As for honours, I've had a few along the way, and to be honest, I never expected any of them. I made a good living for decades, and that was enough; that, and maybe a good residual cheque from time to time.
If the US Government was a family—they would be making $58,000 a year, spending $75,000 a year, & are $327,000 in credit card debt. They are currently proposing BIG spending cuts to reduce their spending to $72,000 a year. These are the actual proportions of the federal budget & debt, reduced to a level that we can understand.
After working for a whole year without a break, I made Rs 80,000, and took a loan of 50,000 from my parents. I bought a car, and as luck would have it, it got stolen.
My first year in the big leagues, I made $17,000. It was easy to go out and get another $17,000 relief pitcher. I never worried about innings or pitches. I just pitched.
My first year on 'SNL', I made $90,000 dollars. And I bought a red Corvette for $45,000 dollars. I'm thinking, 'I've got 45 grand left!' Taxes didn't even come into my equation. At the end of the first year of making 90 grand I was 25, 30 in the hole. We live in this baller, spend-money culture.
If we just made one movie, 'The Hobbit,' the fact is that all the fans, the eight-, nine- and 10-year-old boys, they would watch it 1,000 times. Now, they've got three films they can watch 1,000 times.
We must be careful that the people who make $5,000 a year are not pitted against those that make $25,000 a year by those who make $900,000.
I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.
My first year on 'SNL', I made $90,000 dollars.
My best year I made $25,000. Of course, that was back in the '70s.
Leona Helmsley's dog made $12 million last year... and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio, made $30,000. It's just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains.
There are 100,000 actors in the Screen Actors Guild. Only 2,000 of them make more than $75,000 a year.
The only way you can acquire anything is by writing a cheque. At the end of the day you're writing a personal cheque, which tends to concentrate the mind.
Once I opened up a fortune cookie and inside was the guy's cheque next to me I said hey buddy I got your cheque he said thanks.
The air in a man's lungs 10,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 atoms, so that sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has ever lived - Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses.
How much should you earn? As much as you possibly can. It doesn't matter whether you earn $10,000 a year or $100,000 a year as long as you've done the best you can.