So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy solution for me where I don’t have to teach.  Never.

My job was basically to be a delivery boy for all kinds of things, but they also — because I was at Georgetown and studying international affairs, I was assigned to read six newspapers a day and clip the most relevant articles. This is the technology we used. You couldn’t scan articles. There was no “online.” There was nothing, right? So I would read the newspapers, clip the articles I thought they ought to read, put them on a routing slip, which had on it the names of the senior staff of the committee and all the senators who were committee members. And I would send it to the senior staff, and they would decide whether to send any of them on, but I don’t think I’d have won a Rhodes Scholarship if I hadn’t been a clerk on the Foreign Relations Committee. Nobody else I was competing with read six newspapers a day, and they actually paid me good money to read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Washington Star, which existed then, The Baltimore Sun , The St. Louis Post Dispatch , and then we alternated — and — oh, and The Wall Street Journal . We read them every day. Those were the six papers we read. I did, and then that’s what the senators got.

The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters.

But from day one, I really wanted to build the kind of company my father never got a chance to work for. A company that honors and respects the dignity of work and the dignity of all men and all women. And that is why we became the first company in all of America to provide comprehensive health insurance 30 years ahead of the affordable care act, as well as ownership in the form of stock options for all of our employees, including part-time people because it is my firm belief that success in business and in life is best when it's shared.

It’s killing the planet. It’s killing you. It’s killing all of us. Walk away.

I think the notion of a bucket list is kind of wrong, actually. If you want to do something, go and do it. Don't put it on a list and think, I want to do this before I die. What if you die tomorrow? Just go and do the things. Seize the day. A couple of years ago, I decided I'd like to do a dance piece, and I ended up doing this one-man dance-theater piece about (Scottish poet) Robert Burns. I just wanted to use my body in a different way.

Well, you have to learn to say no. Certain times you have to think, all right, line in the sand. It’s a gut thing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. I’m going to do this Beckett Play in London with Daniel Radcliffe. He said this really interesting thing about how he feels that he’s lucky enough that when he chooses a part, that he only does something that he thinks he can bring something to. I think that’s really good, if you have that choice.

A couple of summers ago, walking through a forest illuminated by fireflies, with my man and our dogs.

The Cumming fragrance line. the soap, Cumming in a bar (still available at alancumming.com) is my favorite ever pun on my name.

I do take a break, but I’ve also got – right now, I’m writing another book, another memoir [a follow-up to his bestselling book Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir], so even though I’m on a break technically, I’ve got that. I’ve got a production company so things are always rolling. I’m always spinning a lot of plates.