I turned down 'Some Like It Hot.' See how smart I am? I felt I couldn't bring anything funny to it. The outfit was funny. I don't need to compete with the wardrobe.

At the end of the day it's got to be a good movie it's got to be a funny movie and it's got to make people think 'Hey I couldn't have spent my time any better.'

If I studied all my life I couldn't think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

I was asked to act when I couldn't act. I was asked to sing 'Funny Face' when I couldn't sing and dance with Fred Astaire when I couldn't dance - and do all kinds of things I wasn't prepared for. Then I tried like mad to cope with it.

I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

I've never let producers tell me what to do. Even when I was making television I always did what I wanted to do and if I couldn't I didn't do it. It was a freedom that these days young directors starting out don't have.

I couldn't relate to kid stuff. 'Jimmy doesn't like me!' Who cares? I was worried we didn't have gas money or food. Those were my concerns.

'The Food Network' was just starting in New York and I was getting lots of attention from Mesa Grill. They had no money so if you couldn't get there by subway you couldn't be on. It wasn't like TV was something I really wanted to do - but I knew it would be great publicity for my restaurants.

Well it's very easy for me to gain weight but even though I tried not eating for a week when I was really young I couldn't do it any longer because I liked my food too much.

I wanted to make Jerusalem as feature film. But we couldn't finance it only through theatrical release we couldn't get all the money we needed. We had to get some money from television. So we said ok let's do it both ways. So we did it in four parts.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data but we couldn't see any.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward to have a low threshold of fear because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I totally related to Cole Porter's magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room which he was famous for doing as was Gershwin. You couldn't drag them away from a piano.

It was a mixed blessing to have famous parents. It was tough to go to auditions and be bad since I couldn't be anonymous.

Major success feels a bit like a coronation. Like I'd become a king. I was one of the most famous people in the world loved and hated in equal measure. I couldn't see anything bad with it. It made me a happy person.

I always loved working as an actress but I didn't understand why I couldn't just opt out of being famous. And then I realized you can and I think I did. And eventually I came to understand that you can do that and also keep working.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.