One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually wrote so much through the '70s and '80s that I made a living. And very rarely have I had to take another job. And now it's impossible for anybody coming up to make such a living. They've pissed in the temple, you know?
I did Bored To Death with Jason [Schwartzman] and Zach Galifianakis and those guys. I mean, how lucky can you be that you get to be the old guy? I get to be Robert Preston to them now. That's what I feel. My job is to pass on what Preston and other people gave to me, which was show up, take the work seriously, don't take yourself seriously, and have a good time and be of service. Be there to support.
I did a film many years ago called The Man Without A Face.Gaby [Hoffmann] was in with Mel Gibson. That was his directing debut. He did a great job.
It's nice to have recognition for doing a good job, but at the end of the day, I'm just an actor and I'm doing my job and I'm always trying to get better at doing that job.
The greatest success is creating whatever you want without conditions. I don't do commissions unless I really want to, because it's like having a job.
In a flat choice between smoke and jobs, we're for jobs... But just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.
And I want you to know that I have no intention whatever of ever walking away from the job that the people elected me to do for the people of the United States.
Government has the responsibility to provide the climate in which Americans, all Americans, have an opportunity for good jobs; and not only for good jobs, but an opportunity if they have the ability and the desire, to be owners and managers, to have a piece of the action, because if they have a piece of the action, then they believe in the system rather than fighting against it.
Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.
I think of Pope Gregory the Great. He wanted the cloister. He wanted to pray and study, and yet he was thrust into this administrative job, and he submitted to that. And in that submission, he became a great leader. You could say that the only person who is safe to lead is the person who is free to submit.
I certainly think one of the really amazing things about Mr. Trump's victory is there's been an immediate - what one of my friends calls a jump-to-the-Trump in Australia. So you've got politicians of all sides looking at this amazing result in America and thinking, I'd like a bit of that. Can I have a bit of that? And so the opposition leader has been talking about immigrants stealing people's jobs. The prime minister has started talking about media elites in exactly the same terms as President-elect Trump.
My job is to have empathy and curiosity for things that I've never done. Also, I'm a person whom people talk to.
I had some bad jobs when I was young. Writing is not one of them. If you're fortunate enough to reach my age, to still be writing, you have to be grateful, and I am. I've been lucky. For many years, all I've done is writing, and it's all I've ever wanted to do.
I think it's always wrong of writers to make too much of the pains of their labors, because most people have much worse jobs and suffer such indignities and hardships.
If we want to postulate a deity capable of engineering all the organized complexity in the world, either instantaneously or by guiding evolution, that deity must have been vastly complex in the first place. The creationist, whether a naive Bible-thumper or an educated bishop, simply postulates an already existing being of prodigious intelligence and complexity. If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!
I don't really like to watch myself [in movie] very much, even afterwards. I kind of feel that when I've finished shooting, that's my job done, really. It's not my business what happens to it next. I just do what I do and that's what I love: doing it.
People who eat potatoes will never be able to perform their abilities in whatever job they choose to have.
I am not a Hispanic candidate. I am an American candidate who happens to be of Hispanic heritage, who understands the culture, who has worked the border and has a unique understanding of those issues. But rest assured my job is to represent all Americans as a U.S. senator.
Virgin, is how good you are with people. If you're - if you're good with people and you've got - you know, and you really care, genuinely care about people then I'm sure we could find a job for you at Virgin. I think, you know, that, you know, that the companies that look after their people are the companies that do really well. I'm sure we'd like a few other attributes, but that would be the most important one.
The idea that business is strictly a numbers affair has always struck me as preposterous. For one thing, I've never been particularly good at numbers, but I think I've done a reasonable job with feelings. And I'm convinced that it is feelings - and feelings alone - that account for the success of the Virgin brand in all of its myriad forms.
...making profits is important because it keeps all our people in jobs and, you know, it keeps what we - what we've created going, but, you know, what we're - what I get my - what I'm proud about doing is creating companies which we're really proud of, you know, which we can really be proud of and a byproduct of that hopefully will be that they'll be profitable and be able to pay the bills.
Our model is to develop each business separately with its own shareholder and management - this way we can concentrate on the job in hand, rather than be part of some enormous and faceless conglomerate.
Learn to raise capital by any means necessary. That's your primary job as an entrepreneur. You must continually raise capital from family and friends, banks, suppliers, customers and investors.
To my mind, nothing is as important as good writing, because in literature, the walls between people and cultures are broken down, and the things that plague us most—suspicion and fear of the other, and the tendency to see whole groups of people as objects, as monoliths of one cultural stereotype or another—are defeated. This work is not done as a job, ladies and gentlemen, it is done out of love for the art and the artists who brought it forth, and who still bring it forth to us, down the years and across ignorance and chaos and borderlines.
One man's fantasy is another man's job.
