If you're early on in your career and they give you a choice between a great mentor or higher pay, take the mentor every time. It's not even close. And don't even think about leaving that mentor until your learning curve peaks.

With my business, the way you make big money is you find a great management team and a good concept, and you stick to it, and you add to it over time. In philanthropy, there was more this idea that once an idea was formulated, you moved along.

I love being around kids. I couldn't figure out why all these 70-year-olds wanted to hang out with me when I was 27. Now I understand, and I'm trying to steal their energy from them like they stole from me at the time.

All in all, I don't think robots and greater automation can bring about a utopian world as I imagined it would as a kid 50 years ago.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

Obviously it's much easier to say that you're going to follow your passions when you're financially secure, but at least we can take solace in the fact that we now have the time to pursue the things that we really want to pursue because now the option of doing things just for the money isn't necessarily there.

We spend money we don't have, on things we don't need, to make impressions that don't matter.

Never use the word 'audience.' The very idea of a public, unless the poet is writing for money, seems wrong to me. Poets don't have an 'audience'. They're talking to a single person all the time.