More than anything, I'm an American kid, and my music reflects that more so than being an Asian-American. I think it's important but also something that can detrimental to your career if celebrated too much.

My audience went, 'Wait, why is she singing jazz? What's going on?' And then they went, 'Oh, because she can. Because she loves it.' And jazz, a music invented by the African-American community, is the greatest art form, I believe, to have ever come out of this country.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.

I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.

Late August still feels like summer here in the Ozarks, but it is the time of year the nighthawks are moving on to their South American wintering grounds.

I feel that, historically, the Art Deco period has the most resonance for me. As a person, it has to be the plucky Clara Bow, the heroine of American silent movies of the 1920s. She embodied feminine dressing mixed with men's style. All this then evolved into the exquisite style and simplicity of Coco Chanel.

Saturday night at my house, I often trot out classic movies and force the urchins to watch them. There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth, but I think it's important to teach kids about American culture, and films are certainly a big part of it.

America always seemed to me this foreign land that I imagined I could escape to if I needed to get away - and I think that came both from the fact that I was born there and from watching so many American movies when I was a kid.

There are millions of Americans who belong by nature in movie theaters as they belong at political rallies or in fortuneteller parlors and on the shoot-the-chutes. To these millions, the movies are a sort of boon - a gaudier version of religion.

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows.

The scene of independent cinema is already a large scene in America, and not in a negative way, but it's cluttered. It's very populated with just American films, so the room left for foreign movies is not extremely vast. The American public also does not really read. They don't read subtitles. But we're like that in Canada, too.

We have to make movies where we do not think this is for the American market or this is for the Chinese market. We have to make a good movie that anyone would just want to sit down and watch because love, language, culture transcend everything.

I only drive in movies. I know that's very weird to hear for an American. I have a weird relationship with it. I know how to drive, but I never went to take the test.

My label is to play bad guys of Latin origin in American movies. I'm happy with that label. I prefer to play that than to play a city boy. The bad guy is always something very tempting for the audience.

Citizen Kane is perhaps the one American talking picture that seems as fresh now as the day it opened. It may seem even fresher.

There is none of that feeling about art that you meet everywhere in Europe. There you will hear people say, 'Oh, you must see such-and-such a statue at 4 o'clock in the afternoon; then the light is beautiful,' or, 'See this monument in the early morning; the light is best for it then.' Do you ever hear anything like that from an American?

Probably millions of Americans got up this morning with a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a donut. No wonder they are sick and fouled up.

And this President wakes up every morning, looks out across America and is proud to announce, 'It could be worse.' It could be worse? Is that what it means to be an American? It could be worse? Of course not. What defines us as Americans is our unwavering conviction that we know it must be better.

I get up at an unholy hour in the morning my work day is completed by the time the sun rises. I have a slightly bad back which has made an enormous contribution to American literature.

Ronald Reagan believed in America as the shining city on the hill - Morning in America. But Donald Trump has a much different vision of American greatness, of nationalism - a much darker view, I think, of the world.

I got hooked to American news like a great TV season. It plays like fiction. I would come home from work, and I would put it on, and I would stay up until 2 in the morning watching it and get up in the morning and watch it.

We, the people. Manifest Destiny. Conceived in liberty. Fear itself. Ask not. Morning in America. United we stand. Yes, we can. In times of great change and tumult, presidents seek to inspire beleaguered Americans by reminding them of their national identity.

I really woke up one morning and said, you know, 'I haven't seen a good film about the American Revolution. And all the ones I have seen haven't been successful, but I'm going to make a successful one.' Well, I wasn't able to do that.