Having your fiscal house in order and having a more manageable macro-economic future is going to be very useful in creating growth.

The funny thing is people won't let me pay for things. I'll be in a restaurant and the manager will say 'Oh no it's on the house.'

I know some people say I can be funny. But there is always a deeper meaning to what I say. I am a socialist at heart and have the interests of the poor in mind. When people see how I manage to work my way out of tough situations it gives them hope in their own life.

My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on freedom of speech but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

I love to deer hunt and fish and drive down the back roads in my truck. All those things basically equal freedom to me - and not having to return that message or call from my record company or management. At some point I need to recharge.

One important theme is the extent to which one can ever correct an error especially outside any frame of religious forgiveness. All of us have done something we regret - how we manage to remove that from our conscience or whether that's even possible interested me.

Without sound conservation and management measures fisheries will quickly become depleted and a basic component of global food security will be lost.

I worked for the Office of Management and Budget in the White House on nuclear energy policy. But I decided it would be much more fun to have a specialty food store so I left Washington D.C. and moved to the Hamptons. And how glad I am that I did!

The number-one job of the hedge-fund manager is not to make sure that you can retire with a smile on your face - it's for him to retire with a smile on his face.

Wealth in even the most improbable cases manages to convey the aspect of intelligence.