Accept business only at a price permitting thoroughness. Then do a thorough job regardless of cost to us.

People in the business will stay with you through drugs and alcohol and divorces and insanity and everything else but you have a failure pal and they don't want to know nothing about you!

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up.

The most important decision I've made in business? The choices of people I have around me. When I first started I brought everybody with me my homies from the neighborhood criminals. I just said 'Come on everybody we made it.' Then I had to realize we didn't make it. I made it.

Kids are brought into show business because they are cute and see truth and they're very bright. But there's a sense of doing it because you want the adults to be approving of you. You want to make them happy.

According to the Small Business Administration more than 70 percent of all family businesses do not survive through the second generation and 8 percent do not make it to a third.

We have in this country a federal government that increasingly is engaged in trying to determine which business which regions which industries will succeed which will not through a whole range of economic development regional development corporate subsidization programs.

After I left the White House I kept a foothold in the business of American politics as a talk-show host analyst commentator speechmaker and occasional writer. I was no longer a practitioner but I was still a partisan a Democrat a blue-stater through and through.

You know every family and every business in California knows what it means to go through tough times.

Death is a billion-dollar business. They can't even pass a law where it takes seven days to get a gun. Why don't you have to go through the same kind of screening you do to get a driver's license? It's totally insane.