It's been a hard time to celebrate, to come out with a smile. But I'm an American. Naomi asked me to come out to support other Americans, and here I am.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, investments in science and technology have proved to be reliable engines of economic growth. If homegrown interest in those fields is not regenerated soon, the comfortable lifestyle to which Americans have become accustomed will draw to a rapid close.

But now Americans, they felt a sense of peace and protection because they've been separated by so many thousands of miles of ocean. And you know, the fact that it's come to the U.S. like this is so sad, and yet you know, what can you do? It's here.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon shook our nation to the core. Americans were deeply frightened, sad, and angry, and they rallied around a President who, at the time, showed impressive certitude and calm.

Americans have always been excellent at making romantic comedies - but dramatically, we don't really try to do it.

There are only two occasions when Americans respect privacy, especially in Presidents. Those are prayer and fishing.

Americans, the eyes of the world are upon you. How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.

As Americans, we're not sure we share values. We're sometimes even afraid to use the word 'values.' We talk about teaching ethics in schools - people say, 'What ethics? Whose ethics? Maybe we can't.' And they confuse that with teaching of religion.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

We Americans can be rightly proud of the fact that the right to the free and unfettered exercise of religion is a primary principle in the vision and founding of our country. It defines us as a people, and has uniquely contributed to making this nation great.

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

North Americans as a whole need to embrace having clothes altered to their body. I hear it all the time: why do the Europeans always look so good? They have a relationship with their tailor and spend the time and money to make their clothes look their best.

I think that the United States and the Philippines have always had a good relationship with each other. We were colonized by the Americans and we have their culture and our traditions even up to this day and I think that we're very welcoming with the Americans. And I don't see any problem with that at all.

Millions of Americans are standing up and saying, 'We want our country back!' Republicans, Democrats, Independents, will not go down the path of Greece, we will not go quietly into the night.

There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.

Considering what Americans have been confronted with in the last ten years, domestically and internationally, it's clear that we need emotional outlets; we have to have some peace from our problems.

Americans never quit.

I think Americans are very patriotic.

Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.

Honestly, Americans are more open-minded and have the patience and the time for new types of music. In Australia and New Zealand, you must earn your place.

The Italians are not indulgent, as Americans are. They don't have the patience to teach young singers how to move. They think you should learn in school.

Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years.

In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.