Technically, I'm a knight. My family goes back a thousand years in the Naples area. We're a titled, noble people.

I don't know what would have been worse: If Mira had come home one day to say she was gay or an actress.

Ultimately, love conquers all, and gay or straight, don't we all want to believe that? I would that if this was to happen to me, and one of my kids had come and told me he or she was gay, I would say: If that's the only way you can live, then I love you.

When I was 25, I was in a show called 'Bajour,' and I was going to leave the show because I couldn't breathe. I couldn't sing, and I couldn't do the basic dance steps I had to do. Fortunately, two actors in the production - who were also yoga instructors - taught me some breathing exercises, and my asthma was cured that day.

My parents didn't want me to go into show business. They were afraid of what would happen if I didn't succeed. They wanted me to get married and have babies. I never saw marriage and family in my life.

You get more irrationality within the family and in consumer behavior than you get, say, in the behavior of firms in their purchases.

The spark for 'In Praise of Slowness' came when I began reading to my children. Every parent knows that kids like their bedtime stories read at a gentle, meandering pace. But I used to be too fast to slow down with the Brothers Grimm. I would zoom through the classic fairy tales, skipping lines, paragraphs, whole pages.

I have never found out that there was in my family an artist or anyone interested in the arts or sciences, and I have never been sufficiently interested in my 'family tree' to bother. My father and mother had come to America on one of those great waves of immigration that followed persecution and pogroms in Czarist Russia and Poland.