The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking!

The only lesson to extract from any civil war is that it's pointless and futile and ugly, and that there is nothing glamorous or heroic about it. There are heroes, but the causes are never heroic.

I was one of five very clever kids, the other kids were cleverer than I was and still are and are very achieving. The girls were always first at everything and I was always 101st!

Being a writer-director can sometimes make you incredibly blinkered.

I think there's something in people where they often want to describe their personal experiences, but when it's regarding wealth, they're obviously very guarded. They're very worried about how people are going to react to what they say.

Lordy, lordy, lordy do I love money. It is a character flaw, no doubt, one that springs from a panicked childhood in which I always felt as if our family was only a couple missed child support payments from being tossed onto the pitiless streets of our suburban New Jersey town.

You couldn't pay me enough money to go back to being 20. So many tears; what a nightmare it was. It's much better being older.

We have the most flexible and adaptive economy. Making sure we sustain the ability of the American economy to perform well is really the priority of economic policy.