My work ethic came from my parents and my fear of failure. I came from a small, predominantly black school and I didn't want to let them down.
All I care is that my family, and my loved ones, understand me. Or that they understand me to a degree - I don't understand me very much. And I don't need the world to understand me. That is the most egocentric thing.
I've been watching 'The Cosby Show' and 'Roseanne' a lot right now, and those work so well because they're not, like, jokey comedies; they are coming from real characters. We want our show to be like that. A family show.
I had five brothers and sisters. Four of them older, and some of them played instruments, and we would get together and have family recitals and raise money for the church. I belonged to a wonderful church community that encouraged me to sing.
But when you lose a family member or something tragic happens, that stays with you forever. You never get over it. Knowing that you have to deal with that for the rest of your life... Football is important, but not as important as you once thought it...
I have many friends who are both Mexican and Mexican-American and others who, I guess you would say, are somewhere in between. The ironic thing is that all three of those categories often exist inside of the same family.
Steve Carell is good. I like him. Who else? Here's another depressing thing: animation has kind of taken over, too. You know, 'Family Guy?' I watch that because the guy is good.
If I keep God first in my life, if I keep my family and friends as second, and then I keep my occupation third, that's when I've found success.
All I really care about is that I'm being honest and I'm real and I'm coming from a real place. There's a part of me that's a total cad and a part of me that's also a family man.
Every day I wake up and I lay in bed counting my blessings and saying my prayers for how fortunate I am to have great fans and health and family.
My father had played the guitar when he was young, and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.
We fought during 'The Wall,' which was an album Waters wrote, based on his family story, we clashed long before that, during the period of the Dark Side and 'Wish You Were Here.' Actually, we never got along.
My father is a Japanese-American and my mother is a Caucasian. So obviously, New Year's Day is big for our family, you know, oshogatsu. We had obon festivals every year. All those things.
Once you've been around this business long enough, anything is a possibility. It's a business first and foremost. Guys play it because they love it, but it is a business, and if you don't understand that it's a business, you're lying to yourself.
I was overjoyed when I was offered the title role in 'Well Done Abba.' I was ready for the role even before I heard the story because you don't ask questions when it is Shyam Benegal's film. It is the chance of a lifetime.
I totally heard by chance that they were doing the casting for a James Bond movie, and that one of the auditions was taking place in Paris. So I tried myself to contact every name involved in the movie I could possibly find on the IMDb!
My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.
If someone gave me the chance to create something, I put myself into it. I just want to try to do something that will last forever and that won't leave people saying, 'Gee, it could have been better, it could've been this, it could've been that.'
There's a way of playing safe, there's a way of using tricks and there's the way I like to play which is dangerously where you're going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven't created before.
Comedy can always be taken the wrong way. If I do a bit that is meant to diffuse racism or sexism, I'm not going to avoid it on the chance that a small portion of the audience might take it the wrong way.
For me it was just more important to get the cancer out. With the double mastectomy I now have less than one per cent chance of getting it back, otherwise it was 20, 30 or 40 per cent chance and for me it wasn't worth it.
