Florenz Ziegfeld, to us and our family, was just a delightful person. My sisters, Mary and Pearl, my brother Charlie and I all worked for him, and he treated us just beautifully, almost like a father. When I went with my mother up to his office, he w...
I'm not sure I would make a direct connection between having press attention as a young person and being interested in the media as an older person. I came to it more organically, coming from a family of Irish Catholic storytellers. Storytelling is a...
I dismiss personal profit and focus exclusively on people and planet. That's what I call social business: a nondividend company dedicated to solving human problems. You can go all the way, forgetting about personal profit, being single-minded about s...
The fears you do not face become your walls. Most people in business, and in their personal lives, design everything so they can avoid doing what makes them feel uncomfortable. Yet any good business person knows we are not only paid to work, but also...
I play knowing that there is somebody watching me out there in the crowd that has never had the opportunity to watch a game before and it might be the only chance they ever to see one, live in person. Michael Jordan once said that in an interview, an...
I don't have an answer for why Hollywood still casts non-ethnic people for ethnic roles. It's something that has to change. Sometimes they'll write a character for a Native person and then say, 'Well, there's no Native actors that can capture the int...
My mindset is of the person who is still unsure whether they have enough money in their ATM to go to another bar. I lived that way when I was unemployed, when I was a snowboard instructor, and when I was at NYU. A lot of my personality is stuck in th...
If you like small government you need to work hard at having a strong national defense that is not so militant. Personal liberty is the purpose of government, to protect liberty - not to run your personal life, not to run the economy, and not to pret...
As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility - whic...
When I paint, I seriously consider the public presence of a person - the surface facade. I am less concerned with how people look when they wake up or how they act at home. A person's public presence reflects his own efforts at image development.
My only real contact with what my father did was that he could get 16-millimeter prints, so every weekend we would show two or three movies at home. But our house wasn't frequented by stars. My father's personal life was his personal life, and it was...
Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are consta...
My dad wanted me to be a professional person, which I was - I was a civil engineer. I graduated from civil engineering at USC in California. I became an engineer, and I helped design the roads for the L.A. County Roads Department. And I did that for ...
Now Dave Eggers, if you lived in San Francisco, is not an easy person to be done with. Everyone - and by everyone, I mean every white person with a college education and an interest in books - wants a piece of him. It's not just his amazingly powerfu...
A person whose skin is metallic can no more have its reproduction restricted than a black-skinned person. Regarding life as a form of machinery and intelligent machines as people without our environmental limitations is essential in understanding FAP...
The America that I think most Americans would want, most economists on the right or left would want, is one in which a smart, ambitious, hardworking person without a huge amount of resources has a pretty good shot, in the end, of beating out a less s...
People wonder aloud about whether I am an okay mother. That is obviously painful because it's so important to me. It's hard to hear that people think I'm not a capable mother and a good person, that they just think I'm nuts.
The music itself is very challenging, so I've never really felt the lack of stimulation. I love to be creating; I love to be making things and solving problems, I suppose, and when I'm not, then I'm not an incredibly good person to be around. If I'm ...
Octavia Spencer rocks. But just as a human being, she's so down-to-earth. Talk about being pleasantly surprised. You walk onto set, and she's making these jokes, and she's playing around with the cast and the crew, and she invited all to her house fo...
The supermarket chain Whole Foods has quite a radical employee empowerment program, where employees get to decide whether another employee can work in their team or not. If they think this person's a slacker, doesn't have good ideas, they can vote an...
One of the interesting things about Twitter is looking how famous people choose to use it. Take someone like Steve Martin, who I follow: it's all sorts of comic gems, nothing private, nothing personal - all jokes. Other celebrities are overtly person...
