I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.

My mother turned into a professional widow. She couldn't understand why I wanted to be an engineer; she thought I should be a chicken farmer.

I was trying to find out what it was that everybody else understood without giving up my stubborn and hard-won lack of understanding.

The self is an oral society in which the present is constantly running a dialogue with the past and the future inside of one skin.

The financial markets tend to be just a backdrop for a novel, for a heist or something that isn't necessarily integral to it. On the whole, I don't think the financial world has been well served by novels.

Most small businesses in this country today are taxed at the individual level as Corporation LLC. So whatever is cut out of those earnings is money taken out of capital for reinvestment for creating more jobs and opening up more locations.

I am successful if I manage to make a film that I want and if it works emotionally for the audience and if it stays with them after the screening and means something for them. Awards or money have symbolic power.

Each life reverberates in every other life. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are connected, woven together in our needs and desires, rich and poor, men and women alike.