My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and ...
I'm a big fan of doing 'Triple D.' But I don't want to do it forever, don't get me wrong! Travel away from my family, are you crazy? But do you know what it does for these mom-and-pop restaurant joints? It changes their lives forever. I mean, their b...
I don't think anybody in my family meant there to be any pressure for me to write. But our parents were incredibly verbal and wrote for a living. The house was full of books, and we all grew up steeped in language. I mean, our mother recited poetry a...
Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out. They don't want to and they don't have the means to sustain it. That's where my hea...
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
I think - I think you have a conscience growing up in a loving family with a nurturing community. And I think what happens is, and that's part of the problem of being in the closet which is a very sick place. I mean it's self loathing. It's self deni...
America is the only high income nation without a paid family leave program. This means that if you or a family member gets sick, there is no guarantee that you can take the time you need to take care of yourself or your loved one, leaving already vul...
Some of what I am doing when I am researching is looking for things people in my family have done and finding out what those things mean, why they did those things and seeing how I fit into them.
Leaving America means renouncing your citizenship, moving out of the country and leaving family and friends behind. You can retain your citizenship if you like, but you'll still be away from loved ones and still be paying taxes. You lose all the good...
Since 2005, I have not spent much time with my family. In fact I have spent more time at the Taj Landsend in Mumbai. It was my 100th visit recently, which means I have spent more than 400 days in that hotel, and that is a lot more than I have spent w...
My friends and family have been so well trained that they know I really mean it when I say that I don't care if the review is good, because that can be as dangerous as when it's bad. It's less demoralizing, but it can be just as confusing.
I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, a...
I always, always liked children... I was very afraid of them before. Because I never really grew up, I mean, with a lot of little kids around. Even though I am from a kind of Italian family, I never really grew up with a lot of little kids around.
Here's the thing: I'm not beautiful. I mean, I'm a perfectly normal-looking Jewish guy. My face has never been my fortune, nor has my body... physical beauty has never been part of my equation. It's just not on my shopping list.
I do take very good care of myself, and I'm always in love. And by that I mean I have an appetite for life. I'm in love with beauty and things and people and love and being in love, and those things I think, on the inside, show on the outside.
You may love football, but that doesn't mean you have any business trying to play the sport. It's the same thing with filmmaking... everybody has a great idea for a movie, but do you have the stamina to get good at your craft and deal with how heartb...
Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And t...
Authors should do multiple submissions to agents. I mean, that's the way the business world works and whether or not the industry likes it or not, they can't stop you from submitting to multiple agents and you know what? If an agent misses out on you...
We have been spending beyond our means, we are going to focus on the projects that we committed to in the election but importantly if there is additional projects or new things that come up they have to have a business case, they have to work and the...
The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these 'omics' that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just j...
It's far too much to say that effective hoping is the only - or even the biggest - part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the qua...
