In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.

What the war did was give me the opportunity of three years of continuous reading, and it was in the course of reading that I became convinced that I should become an economist.

I went to elementary school in Ottawa, and then to a private secondary school.

My brother and sister are both older than I am and were born before my father went off to World War I.

My father had not even completed high school when he started as an office boy working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and I am not sure that my mother completed high school.

When it came time to go to college, I had been accepted for Harvard when my father was offered the position of head of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company office on the west coast, and we moved to San Francisco.

My record at the University of California as an undergraduate was mediocre to say the best.

The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

My early work and publications centered around expanding on the analysis of life insurance in my dissertation and its relationship to investment banking.

I was opposed to World War II, and indeed on June 22, 1941 when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union I suddenly found myself the lone supporter of peace since everybody else had, because of their communist beliefs, shifted over to become supporters of the war.

Our family life was certainly not intellectual.

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

I would be remiss if I left the impression that my life has been totally preoccupied with scholarly research.

I learned to fly an airplane, and had my own airplane during the 1960s.

In 1972 I married again, to Elisabeth Case; she continues to be wife, companion, critic and editor: a partner in the projects and programs that we undertake.

I had hoped to go to law school, but the war started, and because of the strong feeling that I did not want to kill anybody, I joined the Merchant Marine when I graduated from Berkeley.

While I was there I became deeply interested in photography, and indeed the most noteworthy event in my early life was winning first, third, fourth and seventh prizes in an international competition for college and high school students.

I continue to be a photographer; I have enjoyed fishing and hunting with a close friend; and have owned two ranches, first in northern California and then in the state of Washington.

I went back to graduate school with the clear intention that what I wanted to do with my life was to improve societies, and the way to do that was to find out what made economies work the way they did or fail to work.

My wife and I now live in the summers in northern Michigan in an environment which is wonderfully conducive to research, and where most of my work in the last 15 years has been done.

I'm lucky enough that directors sometimes seek me out for little projects that people don't even know about, that just surface later on.

The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.

Most projects start out slowly - and then sort of taper off.

I haven't really had that many opportunities to play "lead" so I guess I jumped at the chance. I have also never done any "sci-fi" projects and thought it might be fun.

Further, Japan is the second largest donor in Iraq after the United States, with over $5 billion dollars for humanitarian, infrastructure and reconstruction projects.

Most of the auditions I went on, I passed up the projects because I just wasn't interested. When I read A Knight's Tale, that was that. I knew I wanted to do this movie.

The Oscar changed everything. Better salary, working with better people, better projects, more exposure, less privacy.

I wasn't a cheerleader or the prom queen. I don't move through the world with a mirror in front of my face, and I've never been attracted to projects that had an emphasis on what I look like.

By failing to keep their end of the bargain, the Bush administration would allow New Jersey projects to deteriorate and make New Jersey highways and bridges less safe.

Now, there is no way to say how long some projects take, that's our principle.

The excitement level for me working on projects is really not a bit different from when I was 26.

They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!

Certainly I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society.

Duncan Aldrich has been my partner in most recording projects, and touring projects, for the past decade.

In the war, most young men were inducted into the armed forces at the age of 17. A group of students was permitted to attend university before taking part in wartime research projects.

I don't really look for specific types of projects any more. I'm not taking care of a career anymore. I'm just having fun acting.

I've been writing a lot, I've a few projects I'm trying to finance, I do some acting, I do some directing... Apart from that, if I could get lower that a ten handicap on my golf game I'd be thrilled.

I'm not saying they won't be bigger projects someday.

Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing.

But probably for the last ten years or so, I've been fitting in animation work into my other projects.

The band projects just took natural priority. I didn't really have a solo career, just wanted to share the music in another way and to learn more about writing, recording, etcetera.

As you get older and ease your way into being a character actor you have to be comfortable with where you are in life and career, and I'm very comfortable with what I'm doing - working on projects I'm proud of.

I feel I have so many projects and I haven't completed them yet.

I was going to visit IBM for six months as a visiting scientist. Now, six months is a lot of time, so I came with a whole list of projects that I might want to work on.

The Texas Energy Office's Loan Star Program has reduced building energy consumption and taxpayers' energy costs through the efficient operation of public buildings, saving taxpayers more than $172 million through energy efficiency projects.

And I love doing my own projects; that's what I've always wanted to do.

The local music community here was dying for a place to record, so we started doing acoustic, folk and bluegrass and then did rock projects for other bands, as well as for my son Tal and my own work.

NSF is the only federal agency with a proven track record of selecting education projects through a rigorous, careful and competitive process that draws on a wide variety of experts from outside government.

As Mayor, I will lead city government, businesses, and community groups to support innovative projects that will make San Francisco streets and public places vibrant and healthy.