What I’ve got doesn’t hurt. I’ve been lucky. The treatment has been benign. I don’t know if I could concentrate if I was in pain. I’ve never had to stop.

At Cornell, I’d work on preparing my courses, and I’d go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by.  But when it came time to do some research, I couldn’t get to work.  I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn’t do research!  This went on for what I felt was a few years, but when I go back and calculate the timing, it couldn’t have been that long.  Perhaps nowadays I wouldn’t think it was such a long time, but then, it seemed to go on for a very long time.  I simply couldn’t get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn’t go any further.  I was convinced that from the war and everything (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.

The studios are superreluctant to give final cut. They have so much money riding on these things, so they want a committee to go and rule the roost.

I was raised not to dream. I was told to live for others, so I don’t have many dreams, but I face countless obstacles and challenges. Arrogance, conflict, criticism, insults, inaction. At Toyota, there was so much rationalizing of why things couldn’t be done. As if doing nothing was the best option.

I’m very proud of that and I started a drug and substance abuse program in middle schools in New York to help the worst performing schools.

One person that is my role model is my father. ... He’s a man who taught me something very important. And that was — give back to society what you’ve taken out.

What I would do differently? When I went through school, I was in a hurry. I was an economics major as an undergraduate, and I was a finance major in graduate school. I was in a hurry to succeed when I got out in the business world. I’m sorry I didn’t take more courses in the humanities and in history and in the arts.

We stress this commitment by saying, "Our job begins the day we buy a company." It's not about the transaction itself.

Number two I’d say to young people, be curious.

Our wedding day is tied with the births of my three children as the best days of my life.