The major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of blame for the crisis.
If you hire good people, give them good jobs, and pay them good wages, generally something good is going to happen.
Don't live vicariously through your kids or try to shape them into who you wanted to be, like the popular kid or an athlete. Children should be given the opportunity to be themselves.
Software constraints are only confining if you use them for what they're intended to be used for.
Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I'm looking for something different. A lot of chefs' cookbooks are food as it's done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.
You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.
If you want to make pictures and enjoy making them, you better go out and make something that a lot of people want to see. And then they'll turn you lose and let you make what you want. And then maybe you can do some of the things that you want to do. But as a beginner, you haven't got a chance.
As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'
Artists look at the environment, and the best artists correctly diagnose the problem. I'm not saying artists can't be leaders, but that's not the job of art, to lead. Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte - there are artists all through history who have become leaders, but that was already in them, nothing to do with their art.
My job is to defeat the guy in front of me, do it until he quits, and then wait for them to send in the next guy.
I mean, my girls are very sweet; I'm very proud of all of of them.
What I'm attempting to do is to show people that if I can spend some time with very dangerous spiders and snakes and scorpions, then maybe they'll feel different about the spiders and snakes they find around their areas. I don't need people to keep them as pets. I just like them to be respectful and see that everything in nature has its place.
Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn't layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.
A voice is very intimate. It's something of your own. So there's always this fear, because you feel naked. There's a fear of not reaching up to expectations. As you become more famous, people come and expect to hear something extraordinary, so you don't want to disappoint them. I feel this sense of responsibility.
Although it's the second largest country in the world, our useful area has been reduced. Our immigration policy is disgusting: We plunder southern countries by depriving them of future leaders, and we want to increase our population to support economic growth.
If Twitter is worth seven billion next month, I'm happy for them to be worth six billion and spend a billion making it safer for people, for example.
But again, we, I think, over the years have set the example for a lot of nations that may not have had the same values, the same type of coming out of the same culture that we as Americans have and enjoy. But we can be an example, a role model for them.
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
I don't think I'd like to be a different person. But I do sometimes see my cats lolling about and think it would be nice to be one of them.
Advertisers realize that Gen Y is the largest purchasing cohort. Also, that you're going to have to accept some different modes of thinking if you're going to get to them.
Radishes grow just about anywhere. People think, 'Oh it's just a radish.' But radishes are delicious, and people don't think of cooking them.
Well, I turn people into human beings by not making them into gods.
Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?
I don't say that I'm going to be like every other comic that's blue, or gratuitous use of language. I do try to have my own standards: I don't do everything the audience wants, and I do try to surprise them.
I love Christmas tree bulbs, and I started putting them in my paintings. You've got to plug this painting in, and it's got a rig in the back, so that each one can be replaced if it burns out.
I'm kind of a horse whisperer; I don't know what it is. I'm not great on a horse. I'm getting better, but I'm not brilliant. So yeah, I've spent a lot of time with horses. They're great creatures; I love them. I do love riding them when I get the chance to.
I was being rejected all the time. Agents would say, 'I don't think you're the type they're looking for.' I was always like, 'You think? I don't want you to think. I want them to think that.' This business is all about someone's opinion, but not the agent or the manager's. How do they know? They're not that person.
You see women struggling to keep it all together while a loved one is in jail. But we don't hear about them or their struggles in a way that resonates with others. Their stories are so compelling. It's as if they are in their own little world and no one else sees them.
The person who receives the most favors is the one who knows how to return them.
Searching for what I need, and I don't even know precisely what that is, I was going from a man to a man, and I saw that all of them together have less than me who has nothing, and that I left to each of them a bit of that what I don't have and I've been searching for.
The reason that ISIL was so successful, yes, it had to do with their capabilities and prowess on the battlefield, but they were dealing with a receptive constituency in northern Iraq because of the intense hatred of the Maliki government, which of course is imposing the Shia view on them.
While Free Choice Vouchers didn't fulfill my vision of a health care system in which every American would be empowered to hire and fire their insurance company, they were a foothold for choice and competition and a safety valve for Americans whose employers are already forcing them to bear more and more of their family's health insurance costs.
I'm always sad when Dad doesn't like my columns. He waits for them every week and usually likes them, in which case he doesn't say a word - it's only if he's critical that he bothers to call.
Back in the days, we had to work with a shoestring budget. We had a movie screen, and we'd show movie trailers on them, and then we'd rip through it and started playing. Now we have a little money to play with to do a cool stage set.
I didn't particularly want to go to Westminster - not that there were many seats available or chances for women to get elected. In 1987, Labour sent down 50 MPs, and only one of them was a woman.
