My parents instilled in me that life was going to be very difficult and that I'd have to work for everything.
In terms of instilling the values of mental toughness and work ethic, discipline is the gift that keeps on giving.
A lot of my work involves instilling objects with the power of touch - a transference of soul, spirit, energy through actions.
I have much to learn from my daughter Sofia. Her minimalism exposes my limitations: I'm too instinctive and operatic, I put too much heart into my work, I get lost sometimes in bizarre things - it's my Italian heritage.
I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.
You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.
I'm a work in progress. You know, my kids didn't come with instructions... and neither did this business, so when I put the two of them together, I gotta take it a little at a time.
There are different groups of people in your life that you behave slightly differently with. You behave one way with your family. You behave in a different way with your work colleagues. You behave differently with your friends from the movie club, your fitness instructor - all subtly different personas.
We can't afford big symphonies but we commission works that sound rich and symphonic because of the nature of the instrumentation and the people we work with.
I'm intimidated anytime I work with someone who's directly outside my very insulated group of friends.
If you work on a comedy show, your basic form of communication is teasing. That's generally how we speak to each other: you communicate the information between the lines of insulting sentences.
It's just really hard to work and get better, building and planning for the future with the new Monte Carlo and keeping the race team intact and keeping them healthy.
Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too.
If you work hard at anything, you're going to experience some success. And the greatest gift is when you have something you really love to do and you can integrate that into your work life. I feel like it's a real privilege that I get to do something that is good for my community and good for the world. But it's also pleasurable for me.
I think Pixar's done an amazing job integrating art and science. They really get this idea that art and engineering work side by side.
As a financial historian, I was quite isolated in Oxford - British historians are supposed to write about kings - so the quality of intellectual life in my field is much higher at Harvard. The students work harder there.
I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.
All growth depends upon activity. There is no development physically or intellectually without effort, and effort means work.
The kind of people that all teams need are people who are humble, hungry, and smart: humble being little ego, focusing more on their teammates than on themselves. Hungry, meaning they have a strong work ethic, are determined to get things done, and contribute any way they can. Smart, meaning not intellectually smart but inner personally smart.
Will searching for distant messages work? Is there intelligent life out there? The SETI effort is worth continuing, but our common-sense beacons approach seems more likely to answer those questions.
