If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.

You built a factory out there good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads that the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for.

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is in fact a return to the idealised past.

The factory of the future will have only two employees a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.

The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field which at that point was being an actress.

It makes sense that we came up with our public school system during the Industrial Revolution because it's like everybody is a factory worker eating their terrible food and going back to the room where you're silent and listening to an idiot. That's an epitomizing idea getting called 'Nothing' for your whole high school experience.

Food was always a big part of my life. My grandfather was one of 14 kids and his parents had a pasta factory so as a kid he and his siblings would sell pasta door to door. After he became a movie producer he opened up De Laurentiis Food Stores - one in Los Angeles and one in New York.

When I was 19 I made my first good week's pay as a club musician. It was enough money for me to quit my job at the factory and still pay the rent and buy some food. I freaked.

My grandfather's family used to own a pasta factory in Naples and they would go door-to-door selling their pasta. So his love of food came from his parents which was then passed down to my mother and then again to me.

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him family was everything. We could disagree inside the house but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor he looked sideways but said okay.