It's a tremendous honor. It really is a privilege, not just a right. You're in the NFL and you wear the shield now. It means the world to me; it really is a special feeling, and my family's gotten a real kick out of it.
One way and another I was having a ball - playing gigs, jamming and listening to fine musicians. Then came a crisis at home. My stepfather fell sick, and it meant I had to support the family.
New Year's Eve was always a big occasion at home with the family. Every year we would get the karaoke machine out and I'd entertain everyone, even as a young kid.
My father was a carpenter, a very good carpenter. He also worked for the Jones boys. They were not family members, we weren't related at all. They started the policy racket in Chicago, and they had the five and dime store.
All my family back to the 1700s were water Gypsies. My brothers and me, we were the first ones to be born on dry land. All the rest of them were born on barges in the canals.
The whole point of being in this business and being blessed and being successful is that you're able to do things for your friends or your family, which means that they can have something special in their lives, too.
To try and stand outside the marriage, I'd say we have complementary capabilities. I do the hustling and the business. I do more script reading. I handle contracts.
Whether people choose to have same sex relationships or relationships outside the marriage - whatever happens between two consenting adults should be purely their business, not the state's or the society's.
How do you explain the bond between man and wife? Well, for one thing, it's private. What people do in their own marriage is their own business.
Positive thinking is the key to success in business, education, pro football, anything that you can mention. I go out there thinking that I'm going to complete every pass.
Football teaches you hard work. It takes a lot of unspectacular preparation to have spectacular results in both business and football.
When you make that crossover from life to real life, when you're not treated as a child anymore but as a man, and you are no longer given the benefit of the doubt, it takes some courage to face that.
I definitely feel sorry more people don't get to see my films. They aren't inaccessible, and if people got the chance to see them, I know they'd like them.
I feel more like I'm a person who has so much to offer in different capacities that it would be a danger for me not to give myself a chance to spread my wings in all different directions.
I have always found it difficult to wait for things - whether it was to see my father or sailor brother, Alan, again after their long sea trips, or the chance of a better job, or even new curtains.
I think even back as far as 'Lord of the Rings,' there was always the chance that 'The Hobbit' would be made, even way back then. Of course at that point, Peter Jackson didn't probably think at that point that he'd be directing it.
So, I was just a young guy, maybe with an idea, and Cecil Taylor, himself a rebel, would take a chance on a guy like me. It turned out to be a very symbiotic partnership. I learned a lot from him.
Hopefully, I can play both sides of the fence. That's probably what winning the Oscar gives me, the chance to do something with a studio and do other things that I really want to do.
My number one goal as a thriller writer is to entertain you. But I've got a chance to not only entertain people, but have them close my book and be smarter having read it.
There wasn't much around. After the shows, we would go to an Italian restaurant that a friend of ours owned and so I didn't get a chance to see much. Actually, that holds true of most places I've been.
I wasn't one of those kids who was chasing the dream and wanted to get to Hollywood because one day I was gonna get my chance and be a big star. I never felt like that.
