I think so. I really do. With your own effort, you can improve yourself, but people find they can’t improve beyond a certain point. I like to play golf, but I know that no matter how much I practice, I will never get above a certain level. I think that’s also true of surgery. Some people are born with the gifts and the mind for surgery, and they may go on to great heights. Others may try and try, only to reach a certain plateau.

Yes. Because in the end, experience is what counts. The more experience you have, the better you are. And that’s true of anything you do in airplanes, dogfighting in combat, or anything like that. Your chances of coming out on top depend on your experience level. The more experience you can get, the better chance you have of surviving in a war, or in any situation where you are faced with an emergency.

No, never. Strangely enough, being such a tomboy, and being so—as my mother says—spoiled as a child, once I started dancing and in a way growing up, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was when I really had no reason to be as a child. When you work, it’s a laboratory. The dance studio, when we were working together, was the place where you experiment. I’m not intimidated by failure or making a mistake, because you learn from those situations. You don’t learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don’t really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. When you fail, maybe you failed in that particular instance, but you have discovered something else. A lot of the ballets that we went on to do were built around mistakes that we had made in the classroom. So you never throw anything out. Rebelling takes up energy. As a dancer, you don’t have that kind of energy to throw away.

A writer is no different than a bricklayer or a bus driver in that sense. You must have discipline. Oscar Wilde said that writing is 10 percent genius, 90 percent discipline. You must have discipline for writing. It is not an easy task. It is very lonely. You’re all alone. You are not in company. You are not enjoying yourself in that sense. You are enjoying yourself in another sense. You are delving into your depths, but you are profoundly lonely. It is one of the loneliest careers in the world. In the theater, you are with companions, with directors, actors. In film. In an office. In writing, you are alone. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of will to do it. You must really be in love with what you’re doing to tolerate the huge loneliness of writing.

I think I value the same things everyone does—loyalty, a sense of humor, the ability to make campaign contributions.

My father would make sure that I knew what it meant. Just to give you an example, I started bodybuilding with the age of 15, and my father would say, why are you lifting these dumbbells and barbells? Don't you think it would be better to just go out and chop some wood and shovel some coal for some poor people that don't have anyone? Therefore you would get muscles. But at the same time, you're doing something useful. You're doing something for somebody rather than just for yourself and looking in a mirror at yourself and stuff like that. So he would make sure that you knew what being useful meant.

Well, maybe it was successful in the end. But, I mean, to get there - one of the things that I talk about is not to be afraid of failure because you're going to fail. And I was 19 years old. I was competing in the Mr. Universe contest, and I lost. I had movies that went in the toilet. I have had policy issues and referendums that went in front of the people that I lost. And, of course, in my personal life, you know, my marriage is a big loss. So there's a lot of losses and failures that I've had. And I think that it is important that we recognize that. But no matter what it is, I always had an exciting life and always chased something, and that made, to me, the whole thing worth it. I always felt I was enriched by the fact that I always knew where I was going. And then there were some things that were unexpected. Like, running for governor was something that kind of unfolded only because there was a recall election.

It became such a big part of my life that even when I sleep in past 6 o'clock in the morning, I feel guilty because I hear my father's voice saying, you know, Arnold, that's not how this country was built, by sleeping in. Be useful. Do something. What are you doing now?

Spending time with my family—with no phone, no fax, and no meetings.

People who speak with heavy American accents. I can barely understand them. No, seriously, dishonesty.