My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.

I was born and brought up near a village in Nottinghamshire and in my childhood enjoyed the freedom of the rather isolated country life. After the First World War, my father had bought a small farm, which became a marvelous playground for his five children.

I bought an insurance policy covering the inheritance tax my kids will have to pay when we die, which I thought was a good bit of forward thinking. And I always know I'm going to have enough for tax because I make sure I keep it back in my business account.

I picked up the guitar at 12 yrs old - basically, my mother and father bought it for me for Christmas. I played one at my friend's house; when I say played it, I just played around with it at my friend's house. It just struck me as something I really wanted.

Dad played with me a great deal, as dads should do, and our chief sport was baseball. He bought me a hardball when I was three years old, and he used to sit in a rocker on the front porch while I sat on the grass in the yard, and we'd play catch by the hour.

I was always a kid trying to make a buck. I borrowed a dollar from my dad, went to the penny candy store, bought a dollar's worth of candy, set up my booth, and sold candy for five cents apiece. Ate half my inventory, made $2.50, gave my dad back his dollar.

I never had a job. I bought my first house within a year of getting out of school, and I built a custom one four and a half years later. The Art Center didn't teach much about business, but I learned a lot from the Fortune 500 companies that were my clients.

People always had something to say about the fact I was odd looking, bigger than other people, that I was awkward. When I discovered punk, I bought into it. That look, combined with being fat, made me even less of what people thought a young woman should be.

It was my mustache that landed jobs for me. In those silent-film days it was the mark of a villain. When I realized they had me pegged as a foreign nobleman type I began to live the part, too. I bought a pair of white spats, an ascot tie and a walking stick.

My family home was a rented house in the East End of London. My parents could have bought it at one point, but they preferred to spend their money on holidays and theatre tickets. It was strange to see it handed on to someone else when my father passed away.

When I earnt my first money, I went to a shop and bought jeans and a top. But then I wore them both for such a long time that finally my model agency said, 'You should buy something else!' I was saving the money because it was the first time I'd ever had any.

I was the Kate Moss of my day, atypical of what the public wanted, which was Brigitte Bardot. I was always tall, skinny and angular. But now, society has bought 55 years of my marketing 'Carmen,' and I'm considered beautiful. I hope that empowers older women.

I've chosen my wedding ring large and heavy to continue forever. But exactly because of that all the time that Dave and I have an argument I feel it like handcuffs, and on anger time I throw it in a basket. Poor Dave, he bought me three wedding rings already!

That's what race fans love to see. That's what they bought this ticket for. That's what they're sitting in the grandstands rooting on their favorite driver for is to see him get out there, mix it up clean and bring it home just like we were, third and fourth.

I actually went to the first game in Saints history. We were living in New Orleans at the time. I was eight. They opened against the L.A. Rams in 1976. I went with my dad, and we bought standing-room only seats at Tulane Stadium. We actually sat in the aisle.

You don't get rewarded for taking risk; you get rewarded for buying cheap assets. And if the assets you bought got pushed up in price simply because they were risky, then you are not going to be rewarded for taking a risk; you are going to be punished for it.

We're chipping away at our capacity for wonder. When hologram TVs eventually go on sale, they'll cost £20,000 and be bought only by those strange, heroic, friendless men who live in flats piled high with giant 80s mobiles and DVD players weighing eight stone.

It's like, hmm, there's people with $2000 weaves that could have bought health care with that weave money. They don't have insurance. People want what they want. And I guess that is a reason we have this big credit card problem and a lot of these foreclosures.

I wish I had known that that process of figuring out what you're good at, what you want to do, and where you want to have an impact is not a one-time exercise, but an ongoing one. Instead, I bought into success being an endpoint rather than a constant process.

I make it happen. Who bought Alex Haley's book 'Roots' for TV? Me. I hired the director, hired the writer. I put them all together. I'm like the chef. If I mix all the ingredients right, it's going to taste terrific. If I don't, it's not going to come out good.

There is no longer any anonymity on the Web - unless we mandate it. The most personal information about your online habits is collected, bought and sold, often instantaneously and invisibly. Data collection is a business driven by profits at consumers' expense.

One of the experts bought his first piece at the age of four, so they did start very young, most of them. They did it out of genuine interest but today's kids are much more materialistic and there's a danger, I suppose, that they might just be out to make dosh.

I do as much outdoor stuff as I can. What I've done is I bought a house in the middle of Hollywood, but I live in the forest. I literally live in an area that looks kind of like where I camped as a kid, but in the middle of Hollywood. It's called Laurel Canyon.

I got to live out my 11-year-old fantasies - I got to go on stage with Green Day. Billie Joe called my name from the stage. 'Dookie' was the first album I ever bought. I covered the whole of 'Nimrod' and he'd heard it. That was like the 11-year-old girl dreamed.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've felt comfortable in a suit. It all started when my mom bought me a three-piece Pierre Cardin suit. I wore that thing everywhere. Eventually I realized I was going to be the kid who got beat up in school, but I kept wearing it.

I bought some land in Portugal, on the highest hill in Guimaraes, because I pictured that I wanted to build my house there. I said, 'What a perfect place this would be,' but I forgot to ask the council if I could build a house there. When I did, they said, 'No!'

I have a Chevy Impala that I roll around in and a '89 Jeep Wrangler, which is the first car I ever bought. It has 180,000 miles on it, and that is my daily whip. I take that everywhere. Don't forget where you came from, that's why I'll never get rid of that Jeep.

I miss all of my old friends who have passed away. Sometimes you just don't understand why they were taken so soon. I loved and miss Johnny Cash. I miss my old buddy Johnny Paycheck, who happens to be buried in an area of the cemetery that I bought for my family.

! discovered photography completely by chance. My wife is an architect; when we were young and living in Paris, she bought a camera to take pictures of buildings. For the first time, I looked through a lens - and photography immediately started to invade my life.

A dapper Canadian in his mid-fifties, Rob McEwen bought the disparate collection of gold mining companies known as Goldcorp in 1989. A decade later, he'd unified those companies and was ready for expansion - a process he wanted to start by building a new refinery.

The people who are getting 3-D printers at home are pioneers, kind of like the people who bought Apple IIs in 1981. Adults are usually the last people to get it. The kids are like, 'Get out of my way, I want at this thing.' They immediately start getting creative.

I bought a company in the mid-'90s called Dexter Shoe and paid $400 million for it. And it went to zero. And I gave about $400 million worth of Berkshire stock, which is probably now worth $400 billion. But I've made lots of dumb decisions. That's part of the game.

Money is not the most important thing, but when you need it, there are few substitutes. So while I like the things money can buy, I love what money won't buy. It bought me a house but it won't buy me a home. It would buy me a companion but it won't buy me a friend.

Nokia and Research in Motion needed a modern operating system. They could have bought Palm or Android before Google did, but they didn't. Today, it's probably too late, and at the time they would have been criticized for overpaying, but as they say - shift happens.

After watching my first World Series in 1977, I wanted to be Reggie Jackson. I bought a big Reggie poster. I ate Reggie candy bars. I entered a phase during which I insisted on having the same style of glasses Reggie had: gold wire frames with the double bar across.

I always liked performing in front of my parents' friends. My dad bought me a karaoke machine, and I would put on a Michael Jackson song like 'Thriller,' and I would come out with, like, a hat and a jacket, and, like, moonwalk in my socks, so I was always performing.

This may be a dream, but I'll say it anyway: I was supposed to be married last year, and I bought a gown. When I meet Nelson Mandela, I shall put on this gown and have the train of it removed and put aside, and kiss the ground that he walks on and then kiss his feet.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

I'm compelled to paint nearly every day. I just felt like making a painting, went out and bought paints and a canvas. Now it fulfills me creatively when I'm not doing music: it's something you can do by yourself and it's totally yours. It's a great adjunct to my life.

With every job I've gotten, I've bought myself something. When 'Glee' was picked up, I rented a piano for the year. For smaller victories, I'll go to dinner with a friend, or go for a walk and think about it all. It's important to say to yourself, Today was a good day.

I bought the rights to this book, 'The Ploughmen,' by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I've written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It's really hauntingly beautiful. It's got some suspense and great drama, but it's a real character thing.

I think family, friends and a sense of community give you greater happiness than money. But, of course, one has to have a minimum on which to live. The joy I get from sitting around and having a laugh is immeasurable - much greater than anything that I have ever bought.

People now have been conditioned to believe they should only buy one song at a time, that nobody can make an entire record that would merit you paying, you know, $7, $8, $10 when CDs in the '90s were $18, $19 and people bought millions and millions and millions of them.

I'm trying to create a collection of stories - the 'U.F.O.W.A.V.E.' songs are all stories. I haven't really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden's poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.

I once bought some enormous fireworks that were literally the size of sticks of dynamite. We would go into the field behind our house, slide them into the biggest cow pats we could find, and blow them sky high. It was exhilarating and, for the cows, incredibly confusing.

I'll never understand why people somehow support pollution. It's completely irrational, and I don't get it. Somewhere along the line, they bought into this fiction that one has to choose between the environment and business, which is just a complete falsehood and absurd.

There is an attitude that we should be able to have everything. No, you shouldn't be able to have anything. I'd like a helicopter, but I can't afford a helicopter, so I don't buy one. People are buying stuff they can't afford on credit. I bought my Ford hybrid with cash.

Now, in the space of a year, we've spent 450 percent more for power than we did the year before, and bought essentially the same amount of power. This year, that number's likely to go up. That can't go on forever and have us continue to be the economic engine for America.

I went to an exhibition at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum about Shanghai, about how courtesans had been influential in bringing western culture to Shanghai. I bought a book and in it saw this striking group of women in a photograph called 'The Ten Beauties of Shanghai'.

The coolest Christmas present I've ever received is probably socks. My grandma always gets me socks - every year - and that's something that I've probably never bought for myself. If Christmas wasn't around and my grandma didn't get me socks, I wouldn't own any, probably.

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