I was well-dressed and good at firing people because I really did care. I cared about giving them the opportunity to talk through the situation and was always sincere. I would explain that 'This was a bad match,' and they were probably meant to do other things if they weren't giving their all to this, which paid $10 a hour.
I still remember the first gig where I got people going, it was Rascals in New Jersey, and the place was packed. I was scared. People were expecting me to be funny. I gotta be honest, every time I walk into a club, it's that same fear.
When I was at the age when you were supposed to be glamorous if you were a movie star, I wasn't.
I was just a beginner, and she and I were not in any manner alike, but we got along very well because I was in awe of going to school with Elizabeth Taylor.
I think 'Twilight' was such a phenomenon that it will be awhile before anything like that will happen again. Cause it really influenced pop culture, and the stars of it - well, the people who became stars out of it - their lives were completely changed.
I used to go over to Gene Kelly's house and play volleyball, and Paul Newman and Marlon Brando were always there. You kind of took it for granted because I was 20, 21, 22, and they were a bit older - well, Gene certainly was. But it was just part of daily living. They were in the same profession, and you didn't think that much about it.
Kathie Lee and I were working together on our 'Live' morning show when she started dating Frank. I always loved trying to get her to tell me about her new romance, and it wasn't long before we were watching them take their vows in front of close friends in Southhampton.
In the late 1940s, there weren't any pop stars, and TV didn't exist.
We didn't care about salaries and having a nice car. We just cared about science and were really ambitious.
There's one point where I play the piano upside down. When I first did that, I hit my head and it really hurt. But people were laughing, so we've kept it in ever since. I probably have severe brain damage.
I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.
My mother and father were partisan national heroes: I learned sacrifice and discipline from them and that a private life is not as important as the message you want to leave.
We were born with a capacity to grow, love, marry, and form families.
On 'Far North,' we were always aware of being at the whim of mother nature. She's the biggest star in the film.
People think that the people in Hollywood have some master plan. They just make the movies that people go to see. I think it's that simple. I promise you if people were lining up around the block to see a Bible movie, they'd make Bible movies from now to the end of time.
We had seen the way the print industry had been disrupted; we'd seen how the audio industry got disrupted, so it just seemed like a natural progression that video was next. We thought we were late to the game in 2003.
The older you get, the more you find yourself looking for things you used to see and liked when you were younger.
I like the sound of laughter. I was the guy in the group of friends that would always make the friends laugh. And everyone was like, 'You should do stand up,' so I gave it a shot, and ta-da! They were right.
There were no PCs when I started programming on computers.
When I was a teenager, I had pimples - oh, God, every time someone looked at my face I thought they were looking at my pimples. I put mud on my face to dry them out, and it worked.
Back in the really olden days, dinner was seldom a ceremonial event for U.S. families. Only the very wealthy had a separate dining room. For most, meals were informal, a kind of rolling refueling; often only the men sat down.
I grew up in London, one of four children. We were a very loud family, not a lot of listening, plenty of talking. My mum was a hearth mother: she loved to gather us all around her - Sunday lunches were a big thing. She was very good at thinking on her feet - people used to say she should go into politics.
The Chinese were good to us. The war years for us Russians in China were very good years.
It's funny: when you make a film, you always look back, and there are always crucial decisions that get made. You look back, and at the time they don't seem like it, but you look back, and you see they were absolutely fundamental.
I'm a Progressive. Much in the same way our founding fathers - who, oddly enough, wouldn't get elected today - were Progressives.
Many of my favorite films, if someone were to tell me simply what they're about, I probably wouldn't be that interested. Plot often has so little to do with what's at the heart of a film.
I remember when I was in high school I didn't have a new dress for each special occasion. The girls would bring the fact to my attention, not always too delicately. The boys, however, never bothered with the subject. They were my friends, not because of the size of my wardrobe but because they liked me.
No one should be allowed to make music as if he were made of wood. One must reproduce the musical text exactly, but not play like a stone.
No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday.
I dearly remember the old days... Fleetwood Mac had this one-of-a-kind charm. They were gregarious, charming and cheeky onstage. Very cheeky. They'd have a good time.
Twenty years ago, there were dozens and dozens of independent television producers. There are a couple now, at the most. Mark Burnett, Endemol. It's gone. Everybody works for the Man now. And it's natural law, how that happened: Nobody prescribed it, but it's how things worked out and how it has been for decades, period.
What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn't like that.
Polaroids were the instant thing to get a photo back when I started it. You had to wait two days to get your film back if you had a real camera, and I was more of an instant-gratification guy.
Music was your real passion, this thing you held dear even above family. It was this relationship that never betrayed you. Once it became your job - this thing that was highly visible, this thing that became about commerce - that's when you were holding onto music like it was a palm tree in a hurricane.
It wasn't until after private lessons and learning bass lines that I even noticed bass in the music I was listening to at that age. My ears were blown wide open.
For a long period of history, you were what people said about you, and if your reputation was stained, you were in very serious trouble. People fought duels over this. Then it fades away historically.
