“The poor black people in it make the black people in Gone With the Wind look like Malcolm X.”

You cannot win if you’re not at the table. You have to be where the action is.

It means zero to be against greed.

I’ve never liked the idea of just having an office in a college somewhere and teaching classes and going to the library and doing research all day. I’ve never wanted that. The glamorous life is the life that appeals to me.

The human spirit needs to accomplish, to achieve, to triumph to be happy.

I am back in LA now. And I keep thinking back to my time in New York after the bombings…. I was crying so much I could not see, and the other diners joined in, and I thought, What do you do with such atheistic evil?

Hollywood is largely about scammers and con men. It was my main livelihood for about 25 years, and the scams were beautiful and ugly, cheap and expensive, but, wow, were there a lot of scammers.

The ordinary American – as far as I can tell – knows so much less than he did fifty years ago and has such poor work habits compared with fifty years ago that the average multiplicand of knowledge/capabilities is a much smaller number than it was in 1961.

The first step in getting what you want from life-decide what you want.

I have to tell you I never in my life anticipated getting this old, this fast. It seems as if I were 25 just a few days ago.

I feel as if I’m in on a pass and am damn lucky to have whatever I have. It could all be taken away in a second.

Prime-time network television has become an island without religion in an ever-more-religious America.

Emperor Sid Caesar is gone to eternity himself now. He takes with him the gratitude of every one of us who first learned the relief of laughter from this genuinely great performer.

We are mortgaging ourselves to foreigners on a scale that would make George Washington cry. Every day – every single day – we borrow a billion dollars from foreigners to buy petroleum from abroad, often from countries that hate us.

Faith is not believing that God can. It is knowing that God will.

Nothing happens by itself… it all will come your way, once you understand that you have to make it come your way, by your own exertions.

I agree that there are some bad apples on Wall Street. I spent about ten years exposing corporate and financial fraud for ‘Barron’s’ magazine and I found a lot to write about.