At the end of drama school I made a contract with myself: I'd try acting for five years. I was 26. I had already spent eight years working in restaurants and gas stations. So I had seen enough small businesses to understand that that's what acting is: a small business.

When you're eight years old nothing is your business.

Mom was 50 when my Dad died. She got on a bus every weekday for years and rode 40 miles each morning to Madison. She earned a new degree and learned new skills to start her small business. It wasn't just a new livelihood. It was a new life.

I get a lot of return business. I think it's all those years I put in traveling around the country people saw me before and had a good time so they want to see me again.

One irreducible residual of 38 years in the business is the number of lasting loving friendships I have made.

You can close more business in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get people interested in you.

This is a fantastic time to be entering the business world because business is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the last 50.

Thanks to my mother not a single cardboard box has found its way back into society. We receive gifts in boxes from stores that went out of business twenty years ago.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

Microsoft has had two goals in the last 10 years. One was to copy the Mac and the other was to copy Lotus' success in the spreadsheet - basically the applications business. And over the course of the last 10 years Microsoft accomplished both of those goals. And now they are completely lost.