During my breakdown, many things, tiny things I had not even registered before, had begun to torment me with guilt. I used to steal Splenda from Starbucks. I would go into a Starbucks whenever I needed the sweetener and would take a fistful of packets, even when I didn't buy a coffee.

Brands like Starbucks came along and talked about their brand as itself being a community, the idea that Starbucks is what they like to call a 'third place,' which is not their idea; it's the idea of basic citizenry needing a place that is not work, that is not home, where citizens gather.

I worked in a Starbucks that wasn't very popular - before the big coffee boom in London. My boss didn't take kindly to my incessant sitting. I was like, 'Look, I've dusted everything, the stockroom is all figured out... I would rather sit now so I have the energy when a customer does come in.'

I never really had a job, because I've been cycling from such a young age: there was never really a time to have a job. My mum went into Starbucks once and asked if they had a job for me, and they offered me one - but I never took it up because I couldn't fit the job in with school and cycling.

I'll be in, like, Starbucks or something and I'll say my order and someone will snap their head around and go, 'Whaat, Alaska?! Hieeee!' I find it nice because I can be alone in a strange city where I don't know where I am, and then if a fan runs into me I feel like I am among friends and family.

I didn't understand the culture and what Starbucks was really about. It wasn't a coffee shop. It was really a way of life... we suffer from thinking that since we have it in New York, or it won't work in New York, that it won't work some other place. That's a discipline we keep trying to improve.

I do have an office where about 70 percent of my writing gets done, but sometimes it does get a bit stir-crazy to be cooped up in there, so I'll grab my laptop and write somewhere else: another room in the house, out on the patio, or even Heaven-forbid, a trip to Starbucks. But I also write on the road.

I left Starbucks in 2015. When I was younger, I remember looking at Justin Bieber and wishing I had all these fans, but you know what? Everyone has their path, everyone's path is different, and this is where mine's going. I just didn't want to work at Starbucks. I wanted to be writing music all the time.

I'm not a Starbucks guy. I'm a Dunkin Donuts guy, but I like to pay for the coffee of the other folks behind me in line. It typically costs me less than $10, and makes the other people feel good, but more importantly, it makes me feel so good, and random acts of kindness change the world one person at a time.

Karma is experience, and experience creates memory, and memory creates imagination and desire, and desire creates karma again. If I buy a cup of coffee, that's karma. I now have that memory that might give me the potential desire for having cappuccino, and I walk into Starbucks, and there's karma all over again.

Now it's like, I'll go to Starbucks, or I'll go to the mall or anywhere, and lots of people will recognize me, and I'm like, 'Oh, wow, this is actually a thing now; this is happening.' It can get a little bit crazy at times, but I love meeting people, and people shouldn't feel scared to come up to me and say 'Hi.'

Writing with kids is an adventure. It seems like someone always has the flu or pink-eye. I mean, you don't even have to be in direct contact with anyone to get pink-eye. But for parents who write, flexibility becomes essential, and as long as I have a pad of paper and a pen, I can write anywhere. Starbucks is fine.

I do have a touch of OCD, and I used to obsess about research. But I'm better than I was. Gone are the days when I would drive to a set of traffic lights to find out if you could turn left. I finally realised it didn't matter. A book will not stand or fall on whether or not there's a branch of Starbucks in Brixton.

On the broad spectrum of solitude, I lean toward the extreme end: I work alone, as well as live alone, so I can pass an entire day without uttering so much as a hello to another human being. Sometimes a day's conversation consists of only five words, uttered at the local Starbucks: 'Large coffee with milk, please.'

Starbucks was founded around the experience and the environment of their stores. Starbucks was about a space with comfortable chairs, lots of power outlets, tables and desks at which we could work and the option to spend as much time in their stores as we wanted without any pressure to buy. The coffee was incidental.

Speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, 'Liespotting,' no one wants to meet me in person anymore - no, no, no, no, no. They say, 'It's okay. We'll email you.' I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, 'Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?'

The thing that really struck me was how many firms that we think of as strictly civilian had ties to the Pentagon. Companies like Apple, Starbucks, Oakley the sunglasses manufacturer. Even Google, and a lot of big corporations like PepsiCo, Colgate-Palmolive, and Nestle, that you don't normally think of as defense contractors.

These are such First World problems, but there's a certain claustrophobia to New York. You don't escape in the East Village, but it at least feels full of camaraderie and youth - or full of camaraderie and youth in an East Village that is as full of Chase banks and Starbucks as the Upper West Side, or anywhere else in Manhattan.

When I went around promoting 'Crumb,' there would be days I'd wake up in, like, Houston or Cleveland, and I'd step outside the hotel and get no idea where I was. It all looks the same: one big corporate, consumer theme park. It's all, 'Here's the Starbucks, and here's the Gap, and we'll go over to Banana Republic and the Cineplex.'

We were shooting 'Hot Fuzz' in my hometown of Wells, Somerset, and I remember looking at the dailies and going, 'Wait, there's a Starbucks in the shot. I don't remember that being there!' We had to digitally remove it; the same thing happened with a McDonald's in another scene. I had this sensation of, 'What's going on here? Where am I?'

In business, when you can meet an unmet need that is this primal, even meeting it in a superficial way can create a multi-billion-dollar business - e.g., the chat rooms in AOL when it first came out, or the lounges in Starbucks, or the billion people who are on Facebook - even though these are hardly the most intimate of life experiences.

You see people, you judge. It's just the human thing to do - good or bad, it's a fact. Like when you get a coffee at Starbucks and the person is rude to you. My mom always says, 'Yeah, but you don't know what kind of day they're having.' You don't know the back-story, and that's why it's so fun to be an actor and to get into the back-story.

My favorite Starbucks is nice - Omaha Starbucks stores tend to be friendlier than big-city ones, and the baristas are especially lovely at mine - but it's still a Starbucks.

We need to reinvent food at Starbucks. Less could be more.

I get recognized so much. It happens mostly when I'm in Starbucks.

About 10,000 people a day go on first dates from Match... We're trying to celebrate that, bring those success stories to the forefront and make it even easier in our product to meet up at Starbucks.

One day I was in Starbucks going through one of my books on accounting, and this beautiful young woman came up to me and said, 'My accounting book is different from yours.' Her name was Joyce, she had a background in finance and administration and ran a surgery center. Within a short time, we were married.

Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer pulls at The Great Indoors. Amazon gives every town a bookstore with 2 million titles, while Netflix promises 35,000 different movies on DVD. Choice is everywhere - liberating to some, but to others, a new source of stress.

Do I take criticism of Starbucks personally? Of course I do.

We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your establishment can't come up with an original look, customers expect at least some sleek wood fixtures, nicely upholstered chairs, and faux-Murano glass pendant lights.

When it comes to Starbucks, I take every threat very personally.

We think of Starbucks not as a coffee company but a media company.

Starbucks has changed the rules of engagement for the music industry.

People around the world, they want the authentic Starbucks experience.

The response to the Starbucks brand has been phenomenal in our international markets.

California, in a sense, is almost Starbucks' largest country, with almost 3,000 stores.

Our history is based on extending the brand to categories within the guardrails of Starbucks.

Starbucks has a role and a meaningful relationship with people that is not only about the coffee.

Starbucks is in my blood. It is such a part of me that letting it unravel simply was not an option.

There's this myth that has been exacerbated by others that Starbucks means a $4 cup of coffee, which is not true.

When we began Starbucks, what I wanted to try to do was to create a set of values, guiding principles, and culture.

Starbucks is committed to evolving and enhancing our customer experience with innovative and wholesome food offerings.

We need to put ourselves in the shoes of our customers. That is my new battle cry. Live and breathe Starbucks the way our customers do.

The Starbucks customer and the Teavana customer are two very different customers, two different need states that are highly complimentary.

London, a city where creativity and innovation have always flourished, provides a significant home for Starbucks and a significant gateway into Europe.

I am concerned about any attrition in customer traffic at Starbucks, but I don't want to use the economy, commodity prices or consumer confidence as an excuse.

I could've just walked away but I never could have forgiven myself to allow Starbucks to drift into mediocrity or not be relevant. I just couldn't be a bystander.

For Starbucks, there will be no shortage of the highest-quality arabica beans. I suspect that for some others there could potentially be a problem, not in the near term, but over time.

Starbucks is not an advertiser; people think we are a great marketing company, but in fact we spend very little money on marketing and more money on training our people than advertising.

Post-9/11, we saw an immediate uptick in the amount of people in our stores, all over the country. People wanted that human connection. We are not going to fracture the Starbucks experience.

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