Playtime and toys are good for kids, or they wouldn't buy them. McDonald's can provide that experience. And having dinner with the family is good for kids.

Playtime and toys are good for kids, or they wouldn't buy them. McDonald's can provide that experience. And having dinner with the family is good for kids.

You then get into a period a few years ago, where a lot of external factors that we didn't have anything to do with did hit, and some of them at the same time... devaluations, weak economies, you name it, in various parts of the world.

So Europe's a big driver. And at one point, if the euro hadn't devalued, they would have been making as much money as the US with half the stores. Returns were higher.

McDonald's is almost 50 years old. For 47 years we had a pretty consistent track record of being able to deliver admirable sales.

You have got to have discipline and focus - on the customer and how you run the business.

I think this year we'll open up 900 gross, we're closing some, so the net count is lower, but the 900 are spread all over the place. Some of the closures are relocations, where you're moving it to another place in the marketplace.

When you're doing that you lose your focus on the discipline of the business, and how you train people at Hamburger University, and everybody gets on a bigger, different vision, and they're not on the same page.

I think we have a great track record on being relevant, on identifying consumer trends, needs and wants.

As I said, I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about partner brands.

And so if your competitors aren't growing, if there isn't a competitive reason to grow, and you want focus and discipline to add customers to existing stores, you adjust your strategy.

But I tell you, I would really be interested if there was a partner we could take in, that could put them over here on the side, that would allow us full leverage and access down the road.

We cover hamburgers, chicken, veggie burgers, salads, we've got a pretty broad range. To me, McDonald's isn't only about the food. It's about the prices, it's about the way we eat.

Salads was a big indicator of that - there was a huge market out there for it. And why not tap it? Some of the things we are doing now around the globe are responding to customers. It's not because some guy sued you.

Every year we close 300-400 stores anyway, just relocations.

When you raise prices, you've got to make sure you get it to the bottom line. You can fritter it away because of the way you're running the business, with maybe not a totally disciplined approach.

I think we'll still be a family restaurant, we'll be contemporary, we'll be lifestyle, we won't be old, we won't be 60 years old in the view of the consumer.

But we had a pretty diversified portfolio of businesses around the world and things tended to offset each other. But one or two years ago, we had a lot of things happening at the same time.

The fact of the matter is, most of our orders are not supersized. Less than five per cent are supersized - that's never mentioned. The whole issue has been supersized itself.

And ours is a business that requires discipline and focus.

Ronald has had bicycle safety and safety in the home. Yes, Ronald is McDonald's, second most recognised figure after Santa Claus, and there's an element of obviously benefiting your business.

We have very specific rules about how we go to market with children, and I think they are very responsible.

The markets where we've got real good presence are the older, more mature markets like Australia, and Western Europe - where we've only got 6,000 stores, compared to the US with 13,000.

Some of the analysts were saying, Now you're a cash cow, there's no growth at all, pay it all out in dividends, give me it all, you can't invest wisely.

But, on balance, we seized the marketplace. We've got a great infrastructure. And yes it's struggling in some areas because of some external factors and some internal factors.

I talked about 12 to 18 months, and that's about reaffirming our foundation for sustained growth: getting the discipline back, getting the basics right, getting the customer focus back... so by the end of next year, I hope most of that's in place.

But you know the second month I was here I put out a healthy lifestyles directive. The pundits will say it was because we were sued. Well that's what they say. It was never about that.

But in terms of the code by which we go to market - it's not telling kids to supersize, we're not selling them, generally, products, in the advertising we do to them.

Because we only feed in the United States less than 1 per cent of the meals, most of them are eaten elsewhere. Most meals are eaten at home. So to make McDonald's the target is not going to solve the problem.

You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.

I've danced one time in my life. It was the most mortifying experience I ever had.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

Education is a private matter between the person and the world of knowledge and experience, and has little to do with school or college.

A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than arguments.

By experience we find out a short way by a long wandering.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.

Well, the hardest thing to do, as we know from our own experience on 9/11 is protect everything all the time.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

When I reached adulthood, even now, I could afford to belong to a country club. But I could never belong to a private club because of my experience as a child, because it would isolate me from the whole of humanity.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

If you live long enough, you'll experience everything.

Actually I'd had a certain amount of experience in Europe in the inter-war period, as a banker, and I was also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Chamber of Commerce.

In the case of my book, I don't think it's really the coming-out gay novel that everyone really needed, even though it was received as such. The boy is too creepy, he betrays his teacher, the only adult man with whom he's enjoyed a sexual experience, etc.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.

In my fifty years of experience and memory, I have seen the most amazing increase in the standard of living of a people ever achieved anywhere in the world. This is why I am so sure that our system of free competition and industrial development is sound and must be preserved.