You have to focus on what's important to you and go for it. But don't stab people in the back. It poisons your whole life if you're like that.

I have a lot of energy. I have a great desire to absorb information. I’m not a sponge exactly, but I find that something I look at — just walking around Williamsburg, for example — is a great opportunity for ideas. I’ve been here before, I’ve seen things before, but now my eye gets keener and keener. So I can pick up little things: just the pattern of a brick walk, or the way they’ve attached a light to a house.

I record my radio show, and my staff makes me a nice lunch in the kitchen, usually fish - whatever's freshest and line-caught - and a salad. I drink water and herbal tea, a blend of catnip, elderberry, and horehound.

Study your strengths; then decide how hard you want to work

I think it's very important that whatever you're trying to make or sell or teach has to be basically good. A bad product and you know what? You won't be here in ten years.

It's all about new techniques -- simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster, but not worse.

Our families and our homes are the center of American life, Everything we do is to make those homes-and the lives in them-more beautiful, more comfortable, more functional and more full of life and light and joy for those we love.