I came to Houston for a job, the reason most people move halfway across the country with a first grader and a five-week-old. I came here to teach at Rice.
My parents are proud of their Indian heritage, but they came halfway across the world so their children could be born here, raised here as Americans. They came legally, but they came here in search of the American dream, in search of freedom and opportunity.
The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.
God looked down on this country because this country was founded on the rock and that rock was our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And when the storms came and the rains came, the rock, it did not move. But over the last 15 or 20 years, something began to erode.
In college, I was a cartoonist at 'The Daily Northwestern.' So I draw myself. I was an animator. But basically, I went to Northwestern to major in English, wound up in college for two years. Studied animation there. Came to Disney. My first week at Disney was the week that 'Star Wars' came out.
When I first came to Nashville, people hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels, and we ate when we could.
It was most exciting when people first came up on the stage and then when they came back for the encore. We wanted to make a show that kept on developing, that was interesting, so we tried to do that with our live shows.
Most people who came here came for economic reasons or sometimes for religious or political reasons. I didn't have any of this. I came here, I liked it, I stayed. So I'm a pure American - even more than people who are born here - because I did it by choice as an adult.
The people with the most resources are the federal government. If you can invade a country halfway across the world in a matter of days, you can surely come to the aid of your own citizens in a shorter order of time.
The first music that came to my ear was gospel... I used to sing 'Amazing Grace' with a very strong southern accent and a vibrato already at five years old.
When we finished [training with my wife] we came to St. Paul, because St. Paul was the first place where we got a job offer and we needed some sort of a job to earn some money in order to set up our own studio. It's rather ironic that this job offer came originally through the Walker Art Center.
The guys that I'm on the house shows with four-to-five days a week, every single week that we drive from town-to-town, that's where we came up with so many of our ideas. Where we really got to bond.
I had a great deal of pressure to move to LA after Romancing the Stone came out and I'd become very popular. But people came to me anyway.
I first came to Brazil in the Sixties. Then I started coming back every year since touring most of the country. I grew to love it, the people, the music. I thought this is where I belong. I've been living in Brazil for the past 23 years. I call it my stress-free country.
The first 10 years of my life, I lived as 'Matangi.' When I came to England in '86, my first week of school was terrible because I would put my hand up to answer things, and no one would choose me because they couldn't say my name. My auntie came from Europe to visit us, and she was like, 'Just call yourself something else.'
The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. Well, guess what? The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free! This brother was a conquistador who came with Ponce de Leon. He was looking for the Fountain of Youth just like the white people were.
I loved things like Destiny's Child, and Amy Winehouse's first record came out when I was 11 years old. But as a young, young child, I was just surrounded by Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Chaka Khan - just massive, soulful voices.