My idols are singers like Billie Holiday and Erykah Badu because there's no gloss on what they do.
I mean, when I started out I was billing per hour, like a shrink because you would sit with somebody and work. But most of it, if it's for a live show it's usually a buy-out. A flat fee.
We must think and act like a nation of a billion people and not like that of a million people. Dream, dream, dream!
You give anybody a billion dollars, and of course they are passionate. Passion is one of those things like willpower in that there's 'magical thinking' about it. You've got to be careful about 'magical thinking.'
Like most plutocrats, I, too, am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank.
If I could make a device where people could just intuit everything you are thinking - a little cable you plug into, like, a USB port, I would make a billion dollars.
If I'm a busboy in Philadelphia, then I have to be careful about what I say. But if I'm a public tycoon like Jerry Seinfeld, and I got a billion dollars in my pocket, he's got to be nuts to wonder or worry about what people are going to think.
Librarians in America do something like a couple of billion dollars worth of book business every year.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump promised to 'fix the rigged system.' By 'fix,' he apparently meant rigging it to permanently benefit billionaires like himself.
If I could snap my fingers and do one thing in science, I would get more funding for basic science. But the level of funding that needs to be done is not on the order of millions, like the cost of the Breakthrough Prizes. It's billions to tens of billions.
Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of the sun's energy as heat.
Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.
Poetry. I read Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Hirschfield. I like to read Billy Collins out loud.
My music library is all over the place. I've got A$AP Rocky; I've got Billy Joel. I've got, like, Celine Dion albums that I just worship. There's all kinds of different stuff.
Billy Joel is an incredible musician. He just feels like one of the guys, you know. I grew up listening to his music.
The early Billy Joel stuff I fell in love with, like Glass Houses, is a real rock record.
We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
I love film noir, so Billy Wilder is like my favorite director of all time.
A 527 doesn't have a wife. It doesn't have a brother-in-law who knows a lot about politics, or a union president who calls and doesn't like the color of the suit, or bimbo eruptions. It's the perfect candidate, because it has no personal characteristics.
When I was in my 20s, I thought that being known for 'Swimming Pool' was kind of a burden. Like, 'OK, everyone thinks I am this tanned bimbo,' and I was having problems coping with that image.
