If I designed a computer with 200 chips I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time I have ideas for paintings all the time and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad which I design on and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

I've always been a bit of a decorator. I think if I wasn't a singer I'd probably be in stage setting or interior design or something. I like clutter and I'm quite visually greedy. I can't have things to be plain I have to have things looking interesting... maybe I'm just a frustrated interior designer stuck in a singing career.

Let's be realistic how many people are buying a $2 000 skirt? I love to design things that people can actually buy. I'm staggered by what a boot costs today.

Ever since I was young I loved making things and being part of the design process.

I'm not really a fashion designer. I just love clothes. I've never been to design school. I can't sketch. I can't cut patterns and things. I can shorten things. I can make a dress out of a scarf.

Summer blockbusters are very expensive to make. They have things that have to be expensive such as 600 effects shots or CG characters that have to go a certain way or a film design that is different but expensive.

At some point in your life if you're lucky you get to design the way in which things evolve.

I did not direct my life. I didn't design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That's what life is.

I think it's really important to design things with a kind of personality.

Many things difficult to design prove easy to performance.

Over the past 50 years we got versions of X-ray specs and space vacations and even death rays. But the X-ray specs don't fit on your face - they're big things that screen your luggage for guns. Space vacations are real but they cost $20 million. We have death rays but you have to be a triple Ph.D. to play with them.

There's stuff I don't like to rehearse really emotional things I don't like to rehearse. You just beat it to death.

Why would you be afraid of death? It would be an inconvenience. I have a lot of undone things and it's bound to get in the way. But no it doesn't scare me at all.

I couldn't have foreseen all the good things that have followed my mother's death. The renewed energy the surprising sweetness of grief. The tenderness I feel for strangers on walkers. The deeper love I have for my siblings and friends. The desire to play the mandolin. The gift of a visitation.

I think when you're 10 years old it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things.

Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful.

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being the difference between sanity and insanity the meaning of life and death what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

For a culture that has such a problem with death we seem to deal with it in a quite bizarre way. We see people shot killed and blown up and we find it funny and sexy and all those things. But the reality of it is that every day people die and people are really sad and they grieve and they go through a really difficult process with it.

Lidia Bastianich sorry but kind of boring. I mean I love Lidia but you can fall asleep watching her. And Mario Batali? I love Mario to death... but he's not romantic or sensual. Those are the things I bring to the table.

You always think that 70 is the end of the road: 'Somebody died when they were 73 good life'. You're closer to death and you better make sure you don't waste too much of your time doing things you don't want to do. No point in saying things you don't believe in.

People think celebrities don't have to worry about human things like sickness and death and rent. It's like you've traveled to this Land of Celebrity this other country.

Death is inevitable but Life - that's the tricky bit where things happen.