My wife, as proud as she was of me, hated show business for good reasons. There was something about the spouse always being pushed out of the way, shoved aside. She wanted to get away from it.
I wanted to be Stan Laurel, then I wanted to be Fred Astaire and then Captain Kangaroo. I actually started out as a radio announcer when I was 17 and never left the business, so that's literally 70 years.
I've fallen back on this periodically, although I must say that getting out of the grocery business ranked right up there with getting out of the army as one of the happier experiences of my life.
It is nasty. You can think that you know someone in this business and you really don't. You can be stabbed in the back very easily. You can be praised very easily. It doesn't matter who you are or what you do.
I realize that a lot of business leaders may disagree with me, but I truly believe that God belongs in what my company does. By putting Him first in my operations, He can bless what I attempt.
Learn as many mistakes and what not to do while your business or product is small. Don't be in such a hurry to grow your brand. Make sure that you and the market can sustain any bumps that may occur down the road.
Now that I'm staring down the barrel of the last act of my life, I'm less excited about control and solo effort, and I resent the way the business aspects interfere with my space for creative writing.
Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business - everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness oc...
My charity is in the business of helping firefighters in any way that we can. For instance, after 9/11 we were the second-fastest charity to raise and distribute money to the widows and surviving family members of the 343 firefighters who died that d...
I'm not in the business to make people aware of me, and publicists are very expensive - they're $3,500 a month! I don't want to spend that kind of money so I can get a stupid article in 'Interview' magazine.
After I left the White House, I kept a foothold in the business of American politics; as a talk-show host, analyst, commentator, speechmaker, and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner, but I was still a partisan, a Democrat, a blue-stater...
The thing that I learned early on is you really need to set goals in your life, both short-term and long-term, just like you do in business. Having that long-term goal will enable you to have a plan on how to achieve it.
What's so touching is the way we fight the war right until the moment our business is taken care of and then we turn on a dime and we immediately start taking care of people. It's like a shock and aw shucks campaign.
Once you start trying to sell creativity, you're always going to run into the problem that the people selling it aren't as creative as the people making it, and the people making it don't know how to talk business with the people trying to sell it.
I have always been focused on my job. No profession allows you the luxury of being half-focused. If you're not into it, you're not there. And the film industry is all the more harsh in these cases, perhaps because it's a business of the limelight.
I've fixed hard problems of all kinds, civil rights and business problems. It's the stuff I like to do, and I'm good at it, as a matter of fact... and I never left my conscience at the door.
You know, I look like a woman but I think like a man. And in this world of business, that has helped me a lot. Because by the time they think that I don't know what's goin' on, I then got the money, and gone.
Years ago I wanted to buy an apartment in New York City. I was a single female - I had gone through my divorce - I had three children, I was in show business and black. It was, like, impossible.
I don't even listen to the records after they come out. It's outlawed in my house. My wife and my kids can't play any of my music around me. Once it comes out, for me, it's just business. Numbers.
Everything about it worked, and I don't mean just the movie, but in our experience, we realized there's also a component of luck involved in this business. We had absolutely the most competent people in the studio working on the release and ad campai...
Our fathers were actually business partners in the same real-estate firm, and we got together and thought, How can we get a movie together and get distribution and create a new movie genre? We started by making satires of commercials.
