You can't have an actor where the audience says, aw, that poor, sweet guy. You got to get somebody who's, like, nondescript in a way or just somebody that looks a little like they should get it. So this is all I learned actually learn from Lucy [Ball].

I think a lot of creative people have no sense of numbers and economics.

People always say, well, how do you get through show business? How do you swim the waters? And how do you survive and all that? I had a very solid method, and that is team up with ambitious partners.

I was very proud of that, of taking women and making them vulnerable and so I continued doing that. Right after Beaches I did "Pretty Woman", then I did "Frankie and Johnnie" and then I did "Other Sister" and "Princess Diaries" so that helped me get into the vein there of understanding women and trying to make them very pretty and very interesting.

I think men should go see Beaches too. I think they'll understand women better.

I had never done a Director's Cut narration on Beaches so I did in time for the release of the DVD. It was a great visit and I do a whole-behind-the-scenes thing and I tell stories about Bette [Mudler] and Barbara Hershey and everybody and that was fun. It made me cry again.

I wasn't really that good at being a musician. And then I tried being a standup. I was an actor. I was a photographer. I tried everything. Nothing was particularly working for me, but then, as a musician, I wrote jokes for comics. And they started to buy my jokes, and that's where I thought maybe that might work.