I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.
Sometimes the adversities you go through help you become a person you are proud of, and instead of hating what you're going through, maybe bless it because for some reason; it is going to build you into that person that you are proud of being.
It is very similar to companies like Google and other internet companies. When you go and search on Google you don't pay for that. But sometimes you click on an advert and Google makes money on that.
People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year.
The business of the advertiser is to see that we go about our business with some magic spell or tune or slogan throbbing quietly in the background of our minds.
There are all kinds of people who continue to be largely ignored by advertisers, whose lives largely go unseen. They deserve their moment.
The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.
I was regularly advised not to go into music, that I should give up that foolish dream.
I always want to go darker, and I'm always being advised to stay on the lighter side.
I always go back to Harry Truman: Should we drop an atomic bomb to save 100,000 lives? That's a hell of a decision to make. Did he make that decision by himself? No, he had advisers.
I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way.
Recently, my personal advisors have been telling me to go to America. Actually, people have been walking up to me in the street and telling me to sod off, but that's the same thing, isn't it?
Communities have indicated they'd like support for an advisory board. See, communities want jobs. They don't want a company to go away. They work for those companies. That's how they feed their families, send their kids to college. But they don't want to be poisoned, either.
I can't say it enough that learning how to learn is one of the greatest skills anyone can have. It's why I advocate that everyone go to college.
If I go out and do a set, there's a good chance that I'll watch another comedian. I'll think - not necessarily their words, but oftentimes the message that's behind the words - the sort of belief that their unspokenly advocating, well, sometimes that's offensive.
Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, 'This is fabulous! I wonder why?' And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.
If you're totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don't instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics - your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting.
When doing your aerobic exercise, go at a comfortable pace until you've developed more stamina.
I get really frustrated - actually, it almost makes me angry - when I see, sometimes, magazines will publish a musician's playlist. They'll go and they'll ask, I don't know, somebody from Aerosmith or whoever, Coldplay, to list their five favourite albums. And it's always the same stuff!
I left Aerospace because I wanted to go build, and put spacecraft together.
