You have touched me more profoundly than I thought even you could have touched me - my heart was full when you came here today. Henceforward I am yours for everything.
You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights.
Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.
I waited and worked, and watched the inferior exalted for nearly thirty years; and when recognition came at last, it was too late to alter events, or to make a difference in living.
Maybe one day I'll make a record that's really mysterious and no one knows where it came from or what I wrote it about. But thus far, I've just wanted to explain everything properly.
I'd been going up for things, but I hadn't got anything, and then 'Anne Frank' came out, and there was a sudden flurry. I got a call saying they wanted to see me at the Globe, which was incredible because I'd been coming here since I was 12.
I came back to New York after college like any number of struggling performers, and you just find that niche where you can have some sort of impact. And for me that turned out to be comedy.
I looked about me once again, and suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and into all the fowls that are, and these fled back to the four quarters of the world from whence the horses came, and vanished.
I started off singing when I was little. My parents have said I was singing at 3 years old. So I think it was just something I probably came into this world wanting to do and knowing I was going to do.
I've fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me.
It's like, what happened, I was always leading fashion, and then the grunge thing kind of came along. And because I've been so on top in the '80s you know, I, you know, what can I do? Suddenly go grunge?
Outcome is simply the final score: Who won the game; what numbers came up in a roll of the dice; how high did a stock go. Outcome is the result, regardless of the method used to achieve it. It is not controllable.
When I was 13, Eddie Murphy was to me what Chris Tucker was to 13-year-olds when I made 'Rush Hour.' And 'Rush Hour' really came out of the fact that I grew up watching 'Beverly Hills Cop' and '48 Hrs.'
They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.
I like meeting all my fans and signing autographs, although it can all get a bit crazy. Yesterday, for example, a boy just came over and planted a big kiss on my face! I was like, 'Hello?'
My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.
Well, everybody knew their character. I was the only one who didn't have a partner. I basically showed up when people got in trouble. Where I came from, I don't know. Nobody knows. But I would show up to help.
When I came to New York as a writer, I was taken with the idea that you're only getting in on bridges and ferries and through tunnels. The idea behind 'Takedown' is that it would be very hard to get out.
Right around 2004 when 'Ray' came out, I made a conscious decision to be more discerning because I thought to myself, 'After something like this, I really have to try to be strong enough to turn stuff down.'
I did 'Echo Beach,' a surfing drama that meant I was often topless. Next came 'Demons,' and the opening sequence had me in my boxer shorts; and then there was a scene in 'Trinity' with me walking around in boxer shorts. It was only one scene in each ...
I ordered each man to be presented with something, as strings of ten or a dozen glass beads apiece, and thongs of leather, all which they estimated highly; those which came on board I directed should be fed with molasses.
