My Marine experience helped shape who I am now personally and professionally and I am grateful for that on an almost daily basis.

Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot but it can't access the hidden places.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you. I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself and your imagination and experience but actually in the end you're not playing yourself.

Parents it seems have an almost Olympian persistence when it comes to suggesting more secure and lucrative lines of work for their children who have the notion that writing is an actual profession. I say this from experience.

My mother is a professor of early childhood education. When I was two she would say she knew I was going to be an actor.

In common with many others in the varied branches of our profession my academic education is subnormal.

America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people unable to go to school were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

My professional dreams were coming true while I was living a personal nightmare.

My own dreams fortunately came true in this great state. I became Mr. Universe I became a successful businessman. And even though some people say I still speak with a slight accent I have reached the top of the acting profession.

I'm terrible with my workout regime and following it strictly. I'm terrible with a healthy diet and following it strictly. I'm terrible on the weekends about getting up at reasonable hours and all of those things. But when it comes to my work and the discipline it takes to get to work on time - I hate unprofessionalism.

That's something I learned in art school. I studied graphic design in Germany and my professor emphasized the responsibility that designers and illustrators have towards the people they create things for.

We used to be referred to as bakers and then we became known as cake decorators and now we are known as cake designers. I teach at the French Culinary Institute in New York and cake design is a legitimate profession.

In regards to being a fashion aficionado there's a certain amount of taking yourself seriously in the professional world. The self-effacing person can't completely go down the serious road. But I design and love when things are beautiful.

I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death.

Though I am a Catholic a professing one I have serious doubts about the survival of the human personality after death.

If what you do is being threatened as a profession that could be scary. But that's the same reason why I walked out on stage many times after receiving death threats. I couldn't live without doing what I wanted to do. So at the same time I have to be willing to die for it.