My mom was always saying: 'Be whatever you want to be but stick with it. Don't waver. Don't change who you are for anybody.'

Rather than saying 'My checking account is a wreck ' change it to 'I will learn how to track my spending and balance my checkbook.'

I went through life like an idiot for a great deal of the time saying there's nothing I would change. That was a very arrogant thing to say. There's a lot I would change. There are people I would have steered clear of.

In the back of your mind when you say you want to write music for the movies you're saying that you want a big house a big car and a boat. If you just wanted to write music you could live in Kansas and do it.

You cannot expect the guy who drove the car into the ditch to navigate it out of the ditch. You have to put a new driver in the seat. I'm not saying the new driver is going to be any better but we need a new driver. Kerry is the only choice.

It goes without saying that you should never have more children than you have car windows.

People are always saying that Hollywood messes up kids. I'm like 'No families mess up kids!' I grew up in Hollywood and I'm perfectly fine. If my children want to go into the entertainment business I won't stop them as long as they're passionate about it.

You hear entertainers all the time saying 'If I couldn't get paid for this I'd do it for free.' When's the last time you ever heard a business person say 'If I couldn't get paid for being chairman of British Petroleum I'd do it for free'?

I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate.

I'm not saying I wasn't flawed or amateurish. But you can never say I did anything to appease the music business.

Obamacare has got everyone on edge. I mean small business - men and women or big business are sitting out there saying we have no idea what this is going to cost but we know it's going to cost us and cost us a lot.

You know out-of-touch liberals like Barack Obama say they want a strong economy but in everything they do they show they don't like business very much. But the economy of course is simply the product of all the businesses of the nation added together. So it's a bit like saying you like an omelet but you don't like eggs.

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.

Everyone has an invisible sign hanging from their neck saying 'Make me feel important.' Never forget this message when working with people.

A lot of the fun lies in trying to penetrate the mystery and this is best done by saying over the lines to yourself again and again till they pass through the stage of sounding like nonsense and finally return to a full sense that had at first escaped notice.

The trite saying that honesty is the best policy has met with the just criticism that honesty is not policy. The real honest man is honest from conviction of what is right not from policy.

It is no use saying 'We are doing our best.' You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.

Now I'm not saying I'm fashionable but there are sociological interests that matter to me things that are theoretical political intellectual and also concerned with vanity and beauty that we all think about but that I try to mix up and translate into fashion.

No matter what a woman's appearance may be it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

It got very tedious saying the same jokes in the same way with the same attitude.

I saw 'Taxi Driver ' and 'Taxi Driver' kind of saved my life. The scene where Robert De Niro is looking at himself in the mirror saying 'You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Who the hell else are you talkin' to?' That's the scene that changed my life by changing my attitude about acting.

I do support a sex-positive attitude for young people. Use condoms that's important. I love the idea that promiscuity can be healthy but it's got some dodgy crevasses. Ooh that's a bad reference! But it's got some dangerous cavities there. You know what I'm saying.

It goes without saying that the Jewish people can have no other goal than Palestine and that whatever the fate of the proposition may be our attitude toward the land of our fathers is and shall remain unchangeable.

Even if people do wrong we're social animals so what can we do about stopping them doing the same things in future? Saying people are 'bad' or 'evil' is just an unwillingness to engage an unwillingness to try to empathise. That sanctimonious attitude doesn't help anyone.