If the national government doesn't fix your problem, you've got a problem. You've got to fix it yourself. That's just part of the American way.
When I wrote 'Pink Houses,' nobody was talking about that, right? The next thing I know, you can't see the TV without hearing commercials with 'Listen to the heartbeat of America,' or 'Born the American way.' That whole America thing now - I hate it.
Yes, I'm a patriotic person. For these people who disgrace the American way and burn our flag and do all of these things... I say, don't live here and disgrace my country. Go live in the Middle East and see how you like it.
You can't be a feminist in the United States and stand up for the rights of the American woman and then say that you don't want to stand up for the rights of Palestinian women in Palestine. It's all connected.
You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.
I don't care what your politics are, I would wager that if you asked any American woman which administration would she have most liked to work for as social secretary, she would pick Jacqueline Kennedy's White House as the place to be.
I was repeatedly told that there isn't an African American woman who can open a show on Broadway. I said, 'Well, how do we know? How do we know if we don't do it?' I said, 'I think you're wrong.'
What's been fascinating about shooting my series 'American Woman' is the ubiquity of a woman's experience - and no matter who you are: a rockstar, film director, mom - we all are celebrating this movement of female empowerment, but we also realize we have a long way to go.
I think that American women are further along than any other women in the world. But you can't have peace in a world in which some women or some men or some nations are at different stages of development. There is so much work to be done.
I created the Women's Federation for World Peace in order to restore all that woman originally lost. You American women don't need a man in the position of grandfather, parents, husband, elder or younger brother. You only need the true Adam.
The average American worker gets something like 14 days of paid vacation. In my school, you'd use up ten of those taking care of your kids on teacher professional days, then tack on a couple more for kids getting sick.
The Republican Party is doubling down on this trickle-down theory that says, 'Thou shalt concentrate wealth at the very top of our society. Thou shalt remove regulation from wherever you find it, even on Wall Street. And thou shalt keep wages low for American workers so that we can be more competitive.'
We need American sources of resources, we need American energy, brought to you by American ingenuity and produced by American workers.
I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized.
It was a melting pot in Las Vegas. You got every age level, every ethnic background, every social aura - it was an absolute Americana audience... people who were there to celebrate occasions; people who were there to gamble; people who were there because they were awed by the whole Vegas operation. Tourists.
Whether you like modern incarnations of what country radio hits are, or you like what I'm doing, or you like something really off in folk, poetry Americana land, it's all just music, man. If you like one of them, great - go buy it.
If you write your own lyrics now, and those are the main focus in the EP... people tend to approach it as Americana, which is wild. That’s what leads people to it. But it’s just whatever people want; as long as they like the music.
When you have somebody like a Donald Trump - he made no bones about trying to disprove Barack Obama's Americanism in trying to make him out to be some foreigner that was born in Kenya. I thought that to be very racist.
This American system of ours, call it Americanism, call it capitalism, call it what you will, gives each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it with both hands and make the most of it.
Australia was great. I would advise anybody to go there. In fact, if you couldn't live here, Australia would be the place to live. It's the most Americanized country that I've ever seen in the world.
