I had half my family that were farmers, and I was really pretty good at repairing farm equipment. There was certainly a period of time where I would have been happy to do that, just to be a farm equipment repairman in Dalemead, Alberta.
I enjoy racing historic motorcars from the '50s and '60s. The seed of my interest was planted when I was about 12 years old and took over my mother's Morris Minor. I drove it around my father's farm. But my favorite car is still a McLaren F1, which I have had for 10 years.
In the 1970s, I bought some cheap horses, then decided that if I was going to be in it, I was going to go big time. So in 2001, Bill Casner, a partner with me in Excel, and I bought a breeding farm, WinStar Farm, together.
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.
Always farm fresh eggs, never store bought.
Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country, fought to save it, struggled to make it beautiful. Only then will the love of farm or country fill his heart.
My father, Arthur, was a fishmonger, first at Billingsgate market and later in Camden Town and Golders Green.
I have bought and sold and bought and sold things that have given me great pleasure over the years, and I find I go through phases of what I'm passionate about. And then the next thing comes along, and so the only way of being able to collect the next one is to sell a few of the other ones.
I sold all my medium format equipment in 2005 after Canon came out with the 12 megapixel EOS 1Ds.
I helped start a ceramics company called CPS Technologies. We took it public in 1987 at $12 a share. Three months later, there was this horrible cliff: Black Monday. Fidelity had bought 15 percent of our stock, and their algorithm caused them to dump it all onto the market that day. We dropped from $12 to $2.
I bought a white Panamera - and then sold it because I had no use for it.
My husband had a clothing store in Paris, and I had his factory make specifically for me something similar to the one I was looking for. We made it in different colours, and decided to sell them in the store...and in a day, they were sold out! This sweater became later known as the "poor boy sweater" and it ended up making the cover of Elle magazine, and in a day, I became the "Queen of knit", without knowing anything about knitting!
When stocks are attractive, you buy them. Sure, they can go lower. I've bought stocks at $12 that went to $2, but then they later went to $30. You just don't know when you can find the bottom.
You don't necessarily know you're consuming sugar when you're using store-bought salad dressing, or store-bought tomato sauce, or healthy granola bars. It's added to all these foods.
When 'Ice Ice Baby' was selling a million records a day, I bought several properties: a home next to Michael J. Fox in L.A., a palace in Miami and a mountain cabin in Utah. Then, a few years later, I took a break from touring, saw that my properties had cobwebs, so I sold them, and - to my surprise - I made a huge profit!
Well, really the way worked was that I had probably built fifty robots before Mystery Science Theater, and I had sold them in a store in Minneapolis in a store called Props, which was kind of a high end gift shop.