Production was what I always wanted to do, even when I was skating. I'm a bit of a sponge. When I was going around competing I was always asking, 'What does that light do?' If you want to be successful, you have to understand what people are doing around you.
In Hollywood if you're good looking, tall, have OK teeth and nice skin, the odds of being successful are great. If you're short and fat, it's a different story. But as long as you look like a leading man type, half your job is done already.
Most Italians who came to this country are very patriotic. There was this exciting possibility that if you worked real hard, and you loved something, you could become successful.
I have yet to have a successful outcome of sitting in a room with someone and trying to write a song. The way that I generally co-write is that someone else writes the music or part of the music.
And it just made me realize again because I have know it for some time, that you never get comfortable in this. No matter who you are. No matter who... how successful you are.
My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.
When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities - locally, nationally and globally - that share the characteristics of all successful communities.
