What I hope is in five years' time I can go to the British people in the election and say: Lots of you doubted that coalition politics worked but it has worked.

If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true there would be little hope of advance.

I hope that anyone I worked with wouldn't exploit our relationship.

The rich are always going to say that you know just give us more money and we'll go out and spend more and then it will all trickle down to the rest of you. But that has not worked the last 10 years and I hope the American public is catching on.

When I was at college I worked in a department store called Brit Home Stores which is a pretty lackluster department store selling clothes for middle-aged women. My job was to walk the floor and find anything that was damaged take it to the store room and log it.

However I was a restaurant critic at Chicago magazine before I worked at Esquire and I've been a really enthusiastic home cook for a long time. It's just something I'm passionate about.

Bad psychoanalysis would say I enjoyed pleasing people working really hard and pleasing people which is probably related to my father in some way. But I really liked working hard. When I worked at Disneyland I'd do 12 hours straight and go home thrilled.

My father was a member of the Teamsters Union in California where he helped to organize better health care for workers. My mother worked for more than 20 years on an assembly line.

People really do make the assumption that I had some weirdo Hollywood upbringing but my parents are incredibly down-to-earth people who worked really hard to raise us in a way that was health.

I have worked to expand the health care debate beyond the current for-profit system to include a public option and an amendment to free the states to pursue single payer.

I'm not into animal rights. I'm only into animal welfare and health. I've been with the Morris Animal Foundation since the '70s. We're a health organization. We fund campaign health studies for dogs cats lizards and wildlife. I've worked with the L.A. Zoo for about the same length of time. I get my animal fixes!

My grandmother had six kids - one died as an infant - and she was dirt-poor and all her kids got an education. And my mom grew up poor. And they both worked so hard and cultivated so much of their own happiness. I wanted to have that like an amulet. Not like armor but like a magic feather. Like Dumbo's magic feather.

I dropped out of school for a semester transferred to another college switched to an art major graduated got married and for a while worked as a graphic designer.

So it was sort of an odd time because I had been hired but my paperwork hadn't gone through. So I worked as an intern during the government shutdown as an intern but I already had a job.

We need the private sector to create jobs. If the government could create jobs Communism would have worked but it didn't.

I wasn't a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn't written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

As president Reagan worked very well with Democrats to do big things. It is true that he worked to reduce the size of government and cut federal taxes and he eliminated many regulations but he also raised taxes when necessary.

I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early '60s before we had any government. It worked rather well and there was nobody on the street suffering with no medical care.

My mother was a good recreational cook but what she basically believed about cooking was that if you worked hard and prospered someone else would do it for you.

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman I shall feel that I have worked with God.