I have developed a very strong partiality for the dead: they don't talk back, they don't sue, and they don't have angry relatives.

Mutual funds have historically offered safety and diversification. And they spare you the responsibility of picking individual stocks.

One of the very nice things about investing in the stock market is that you learn about all different aspects of the economy. It's your window into a very large world.

I'm a biographer; I can live with a little hyperbole.

There is no country in the world where it's as easy to find venture capital in the stock market as the United States.

There is a kind of fear, approaching a panic, that's spreading through the Baby Boom Generation, which has suddenly discovered that it will have to provide for its own retirement.

I don't think that a mutual fund that invests exclusively in biotech start-ups or invests exclusively in companies in Thailand offers any great safety or diversification.

The securities laws of the 1930s were so important because it forced companies to file registration statements and issue prospectuses, and it remedied the imbalance of information.

Early on, New York already had a national and even international identity.

Hamilton had one of those extraordinary 18th-century minds that touched on virtually every major topic of the day.

After 1929, so many people had been traumatized by the stock market crash that there was a lost generation.

Stand-up is not something that you're good at right away. You have to do it a ton. But, I think I got to shave a year off because I didn't have to get over stage fright.

I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.

Every time I'm in a foreign place and a different city, I'm always asking around to say, OK, well, what's special here in this particular place? What makes these people move here and why?

This vast and solid earth, that blazing sun, Those skies, thro' which it rolls, must all have end. What then is man? The smallest part of nothing.

Sight and touch, being thus increased in capacity, might belong to some species far superior to man; or rather the human species would be far different had all the senses been thus improved.

I'm not a worrier. I like sleeping.

Being charming takes time and effort, and I am busy.

I loved doing My Favorite Year, which was great fun, and The Ruling Class, which I made with all my chums.

Basically, people in other countries don't want to have to work quite as flat-out as they do in Japan.

I am for religion, against religions.