I decided I wanted to be a dancer. Juilliard was in walking distance from home, so I very stupidly went and applied, not realizing the money it would cost which my parents didn't have. It took a hundred dollars just to apply for a scholarship. But I made it.
I actually was a ballet dancer - I studied ballet from three until 13 - but like very seriously, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a contemporary ballet dancer. I wanted to go to Juilliard.
The price of Christmas toys is outrageous - a hundred dollars, two hundred dollars for video games for the youngsters. I remember a Christmas years ago when my son was a kid. I bought him a tank. It was about a hundred dollars, a lot of money in those days. It was the kind of tank you could actually get inside and ride in. He played in the box it came in. It taught me a very valuable lesson. Next year he got a box. And I got a hundred dollars' worth of scotch.
Naivete is the real reason I applied to Juilliard. I wanted to study drama and not musical theater because I have a hard time dancing. I only applied there.
When we took on the name The Drifters, we became the new Drifters, and signed a contract to be put on salary, which I think was like a hundred dollars a week, a piece, five hundred dollars for all five of us.
It was a very strange, disappointing race in that no one wanted to take it out. That's why I took the lead. I wanted some people to run the real distance and that was frustrating. So I took the pace around the second lap, which in some ways is suicidal...but I wanted the pace to be honest.
I'm Egyptian, and my parents stupidly decided to move us down to South Carolina when I was five, which was pretty brutal.
As soon as Mr. Roosevelt took office, the Federal Reserve began to buy government securities at the rate of ten million dollars a week for 10 weeks, and created one hundred million dollars in new [checkbook] currency, which alleviated the critical famine of money and credit, and the factories started hiring people again.
Even after I had just done Twilight, which made $400 million at the worldwide box office, I could not get financing for three or four projects that I really loved and I thought people would love because they didn't fit some studio or investor's model of thinking, "This will definitely make money." It's a business and a film does potentially cost millions of dollars, and they have to think that they're going to get their money back somehow.
When I was in high school, I wrote a play that I sent off to a competition that took second place. I got a check for a hundred dollars. I never cashed it, because obviously it was worth way more than a hundred dollars.
Why do I want to remove Najib? I should have thought the whole world would know. This man steals money. Not a few hundred dollars, not a few thousand dollars - he stole billions of dollars, and that has been verified by investigations here in Malaysia and the U.S.
The thing is 3,900 out of 4,000 college basketball players are very happy to have a scholarship. They're happy. They've got a $70,000 scholarship and they've got money in their pocket. It's the other hundred guys and they're all going to make money playing basketball and the top guys are going to make a lot of money.
In Rwanda that genocide happened because the international community and the Security Council refused to give, again, another 5000 troops which would have cost, I don't know, maybe fifty, a hundred, million dollars.
I asked my parents for permission to study in America and they were so sure that I wouldn't get in and get a scholarship that they encouraged me to try. So I applied to Yale and got an excellent scholarship. I then worked for the Boston Consulting Group for six and half years.
There is probably not more than one hundred dollars in cash in circulation today. That is, if you were to call in all the bills and silver and gold in the country at noon tomorrow and pile them on the table, you would find that you had just about one hundred dollars, with perhaps several Canadian pennies and a few peppermint Life Savers.
I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.
People need to understand. If they go to a show on Broadway and find seventy people working but only fifty spectators, how much would the ticket cost? That's what El Bulli's about. There are seventy actors who are playing for just fifty spectators. Is the price expensive? It's relative. How much does a normal dinner at a five-star hotel restaurant cost? Four hundred dollars. It's the same as El Bulli. But you can also think of it this way: How much would it cost to eat something that nobody else is eating?