Working for President Nixon was the most extraordinary professional experience of my life. He was endlessly fascinating: brilliant, visionary, kind, generous, warm, funny - and yes, a good man.
When I first found out that I was an Idol finalist, I cried tears of happiness. I was just so happy, and my family was there and the fact that got to see that moment and share that moment with me was just everything to me.
Over the years, I have created close friendships with many successful men, many of whom I have made a lot of money for through deals that I brought to them or business counsel that I have provided.
Show business is one of the few businesses that the devil will actually agree to own just a portion of your soul because he knows if you have a performer's ego you were probably working for him all along.
People are not impressed by watching interviewees cry. People recognize chat shows with personalities as the trivial things that they are. They're not designed to be deep. Quite frankly, people in show business don't stand up to in-depth scrutiny.
Happiness is like a cat, If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay not attention to it and go about your business, you'll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.
I think that's one of the biggest problems in rock is people thinking too much, putting too much emphasis on getting things perfect or completely sorted out. Sometimes that sound of not having everything sorted out is kind of cool.
Even as a kid, if I would come across something cool in the record store, that would be how I found out about bands. It's kind of the same way these days. In a way even less because there are no record stores to go to anymore.
If it is wrong for you to take money from someone else who earned it, to take their money by force for your own needs, then it is certainly just as wrong for you to demand that the government step forward and do this dirty work for you.
The total funding of SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the U.S. is 0.0003 percent of the tax monies spent on health and human services. And it's not even tax money. The SETI Institute's hunt for signals is funded by donations.
Receiving far less attention are the working class heroes, who go about their solitary work routines with quiet dignity, come home from another grueling day, yet still find time to interact with their children.
And now, I still really don't care that much but now I have music playing all the time at home, which is a first for me. Whatever. Everything from Ani DiFranco to Dave Matthews to Jack Johnson and Norah Jones.
In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up.
I say to my children, the reason that marriage - and having children - is so important is that it stops you thinking about yourself. The way to happiness is to give yourself to others and to think of others before you think of yourself.
Call it holistic or holographic thinking, it's been quite effective imagining the world's problems are all right in front of you on a smaller scale with your band. You deal with those relationships, and that's where real major change begins.
I understand that computers, which I once believed to be but a hermaphrodite typewriter-cum-filing cabinet, offer the cyber literate increased ability to communicate. I do not think this is altogether a bad thing, however it may appear on the surface...
I've never really been very interested in computers themselves. I don't watch them; I watch how people behave around them. That's becoming more difficult to do because everything is around them.
I designed a sports car, the Cizeta-Moroder, with Marcello Gandini from Lamborghini; he did the Countach, of course. The Cizeta cost $600,000, but we could bargain - if a Japanese businessman says he wants it for three, fine.
I was involved with a sports car called Cizeta-Moroder, which was the first 16-cylinder car, beautiful. I think we sold about eight cars, and then in '92 the economic crash came, and we had to close the shop.
In high school, during marathon phone conversations, cheap pizza dinners and long suburban car rides, I began to fall for boys because of who they actually were, or at least who I thought they might become.
I want a car that will last 10 years or longer because I totally hate the process of researching, shopping for a new car, and then haggling for the price. I wish I could just snap my fingers and my car is there.
