Loyalty and friendship trumps politics for me.

I'm blessed with four great children and eight grandchildren.

One of my beliefs about leadership is it's not how many followers you have, but how many people you have with different opinions that you can bring together and try to be a good listener.

Leadership is about stepping up when it's the appropriate time and then making sure everyone knows that we're all on the same page.

A lot of people have their big dreams and get knocked down and don't have things go their way. And you never give up hope, and you really just hold on to it. Hard work and perserverance. You just keep getting up and getting up, and then you get that breakthrough.

Sometimes, life is unfair, and you have to suck it up and move on and not use it as an excuse.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

I think it's the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you're a person that matters.

A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they're often the first art a young person sees.

It is one of the most effective attitudes of the neurotic to measure thumbs down, so to speak, a real person by an ideal, since in doing so he can depreciate him as much as he wishes.

Everybody is a political person, whether you say something or you are silent. A political attitude is not whether you go to parliament; it's how you deal with your life, with your surroundings.