It would be really great if I discovered a cure for cancer, but it would only be a little bit less great if my neighbor did. So I am pretty happy when my neighbor becomes wealthier, better educated and more innovative. I feel the same about China and...
At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it's pretty nifty: I don't mine coal; I get paid to write.
I look at my father. He is one of my heroes. He is such an incredible, classy man. He was such a great father and such a great husband in so many ways, and we lived through some pretty tough times losing my mom. When I see all that he did, I think, '...
Eating a lot is an occupational hazard but it's a pretty great problem to have. I spend a lot of time eating sweets on TV - cake, cupcakes, donuts, and pudding. It's a dream job, but at the same time there will be days where I wake up knowing I will ...
I don't get that many scripts. Back in Australia, I've pretty much done my own shows and really no work outside of that. It's only now that I'm starting to read some Hollywood film scripts, and I've read some really great ones.
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...
I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink th...
I thought I was a pretty good physical specimen. But there was a teenager from Brooklyn, who basically wiped the floor with me on the street. He gave me a punch that I didn't even feel. All I knew I was looking up at the sky. I tried to fight him, an...
D.C. fans, I think, are so good. They just come up to me, and they're so nice and so polite and just, 'Hey, I hope you have a great career,' and 'How are you doing, everything's good?' That's pretty much where they leave it at.
I'm a big fan of working out on my own. I put my headphones on and I'm pretty good at self-motivating. At the end of the day, I enjoy it. Once I'm there and once I get going, I tend to love it, and I feel good.
As a physician and as a pilot, I think it lets me be a pretty good translator having one foot in the medical world and one foot in the flying world. Sometimes when the medical guys come in and speak medical stuff to the pilots, the pilots really don'...
They say shock therapy is good for some things, but it didn't do me any good. It was a pretty primitive treatment at the time - once they gave it to you, you couldn't remember how long you'd been there. It knocked me back for a long time. I thought I...
Most coaches would consider leading a team to an Olympic gold medal a capper for a pretty good year. The same goes for winning an NCAA national championship. Or a FIBA world championship. Mike Krzyzewski, head coach of the Duke Blue Devils and Team U...
I want to be taken seriously as the type of musician that plays stuff like an electric rake. I mean, how seriously do you take someone like Spike Jones? They take him pretty seriously - a really good musician who made a great contribution in terms of...
People always ask me how I can hit the ball so far, and I say, 'I just swing.' It's the coaches who first told me I had good bat speed. I was just swinging, and I guess it was fast. I'm pretty fast at everything.
There's a strange sense of accomplishment in making an independent film. Everything's against you; there's no time, and even less money - you bring a bottle of glue, chip in twenty bucks, and hope you all make it through the day. If you manage to fin...
The French are pretty thin-skinned. The few times I mentioned a French writer in 'City Boy,' the relatives would ring up in high dudgeon. I once wrote a mocking review of Marguerite Duras in the 'New York Review of Books,' and good friends of mine in...
So people ask, 'But how can you work for a friend?' I say it's because I know that the magazine is called 'O.' The bottom line is somebody has to have the final word. Oprah's not right all the time, but her record is pretty damn good. That's not to s...
For Sony, owning a studio is a gamble and probably a pretty good one, now that in the broadband era having content is a great advantage when you sell devices that in a ubiquitous world of distribution can actually show programs, movies, content direc...
Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something y...
My father had owned a ranch when he was younger, in Montana, and he remembered riding his horse across the prairie and seeing some large bones sticking out of the ground. He was enough of a geologist, being a sand and gravel man, to have a pretty goo...
