“Because there are so many shows on and because I’ve been so hands-on – I’ve had a piece on almost every single week – I don’t know how to cut back on that. You really can’t.”

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code – even though it was a great yawn – also showed people’s interest in religion.

Just do your job. Get in early. Stay late, and don’t complain. Fight the big fights.

Children are God’s way of punishing us for having sex.

First of all, the Jewish religion has a great deal in common with the Christian religion because, as Rabbi Gillman points out in the show, Christianity is based on Judaism. Christ was Jewish.

The aging process seems to strike first at the mechanism which warns that we have been talking too much and the listener is growing restless. The signal isn’t perfect at any age – drink, for instance, throws it right out of kilter – but it is almost non-existent in old people.

The news media in general are liberal. If you want to be a reporter, you are going to see poverty and misery, and you have to be involved in the human condition.

I didn’t get ahead by sleeping with people. Girls, take heart!

To excel is to reach your own highest dream. But you must also help others, where and when you can, to reach theirs. Personal gain is empty if you do not feel you have positively touched another’s life.

I didn’t have a very religious family.

To feel valued, to know, even if only once in a while, that you can do a job well is an absolutely marvelous feeling.

It’s a fact that it is much more comfortable to be in the position of the person who has been offended than to be the unfortunate cause of it.

When you’re interviewing someone, you’re in control. When you’re being interviewed, you think you’re in control, but you’re not.

Most attractive males talk to most attractive women as if they were Rotarians comparing sales percentages in Des Moines.

But for Muslims, everything that they don’t have on earth is what they get in heaven. They can drink, they can have sex. All of the forbidden pleasures on earth, you can have in paradise.

Celebrities used to be found in clusters, like oysters – and with much the same defensive mechanisms.

I first interviewed Fidel Castro 39 years ago. He was charming and fiercely guarded about his private life. He called our interviews ‘fiery debates.’ During our times together, he made clear to me that he was an absolute dictator and that he was a staunch opponent of democracy.

To me, that’s one of the things that I love about doing this stuff. One day I can work on this piece in watercolor, and then work on something else on the computer, or work on something else that’s a completely different approach

Dealing with the fame and going from nothing and becoming something where everyone wants a piece of you, your life changes in a day.

A good man’s life is all of a piece.

Is that what I’ve become, a piece of meat?

The galleries are simply corporations in the art world – “Here’s a million dollars for this latest piece of crap” – but I’m not about to go along with the gallery system.

Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life…And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.

Our relationships, relationships between adults, how all those pieces fit together – that’s the most complicated thing we all face.

Hugs aren’t like pieces of pie. Plenty of hugs to go around.