I've always thought stability was suffocating and deadly. Like, when I read that the kids I went to law school with have stayed at the same firm, I feel like I'm reading an obituary. How much money do you need? Six million, seven million? Put that in...
Album sales have collapsed, with few artists making money from albums; touring is more lucrative. But I'm 53 now and won't be able to tour forever, so a logical step is to get into writing film scores. Trouble is, you need to be somewhere which has a...
I spent every bit of my money to try and get a Mickey Mantle card, and I don't have one. Growing up in Oklahoma, Mickey Mantle was my idol. And here I am, and I'd go pick cotton to have enough money, and I'd buy all of these packs, and I'd chew all o...
When a series is doing well, it's very tempting to keep writing it, even when the creative well is drying up. It's tempting because that's where the money is. I've had to be very careful; as soon as I think I'm getting close to that dry well, I wrap ...
Remember the Tea Party movement didn't get started in September of 2008 when the bank bailout was passed. It really began on Feb. 19th, 2009 when a television commentator named Rick Santelli stood up and said what the hell are we doing bailing out pe...
A woman at the Limited once asked me, 'Why do you work?' She said, 'You made a lot of money as a young man, so why are you still working?' I had never thought about it before. Forced to consider it, I told her, 'You know why? Because I think that if ...
If I wanted to work financially, I would have made a series of different choices. I do get offered lots of movies which you could make a lot of money out of. And I always say, 'Why would I do that, when someone else could do it much better than me? W...
There are certain times you realize you've got too much money. One was when I started getting bills from the Koi hotel. When I was remodeling the Koi pond, the Koi had to go to the Koi hotel. They ended up staying there for 13 months and I never aske...
Heckles always vary. I mean, some people are just drunk, and it's nonsense, or, you know, some people just want to just repeat something I've said or add their own two cents about an opinion, but because of the nature of what I do and who I am, like,...
In the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect. This is pretty nice. It's also a psychological trap that can stop...
I think that you are what you speak a lot of times, and there's power in the tongue. I feel sorry for the people who always have something negative to say. If something happens bad in my day, I don't tweet about it - I pray about it, or talk to my hu...
I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who mak...
I think that you are what you speak a lot of times, and there's power in the tongue. I feel sorry for the people who always have something negative to say. If something happens bad in my day, I don't tweet about it; I pray about it or talk to my husb...
I get worried sometimes that people are saying 'Why is she on television - is it because of Survivor?' That people are saying, 'She got here the easy way.' But I have been working hard all these years, and I figured I needed to move forward and embra...
For years I've wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for 'The Keepsake' occurred to me: what if an 'ancient' mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder v...
Bin Laden wasn't all that central to the terrorist network any more, but taking him down created a kind of national catharsis. It's been a really, really long time since we had something to celebrate that didn't involve a sports team. I'd rather it h...
You have to list all your special skills on a form when you get an agent. There's fencing, stage combat, horse riding, motorbike riding, Spanish, French, German, whatever. I just ticked everything. I talk about 10 languages according to that form. I ...
I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an...
I've stayed calm when I'm winning and I've stayed calm when I've lost. Tennis is a sport where we have a lot of tournaments every week, so you can't celebrate a lot when you have big victories, and you cannot get too down when you're losing, as in a ...
I think it's a mistake to work on success in career. I've worked on my passions obsessively. How can I say what I want to say more precisely than the last time I said it? Success is such an elusive concept. When you work for it, I think you get it in...
I was writing full time after quitting a job as a high school English teacher, and I hadn't been able to sell anything, and my bank account was down to zero, and all of my friends were like 'What are you doing in the basement, when are you going to g...
