Jewellery's not a big thing for me. The only thing I wear is a gold cross on a chain that I got for my 21st birthday. You have to take it off every day for filming, but that's the only time I'm not wearing it. You won't find me in rings, bracelets or...
I've died so many times. I'm 65. On my 40th birthday, my girlfriend gave me a reel with ways I had died, whether it was by knife, or electrocution or drowning or being thrown off a building or whatever it might have been. I've died a lot of times!
I was born full grown in the middle of a hurricane and an earthquake on 10 September 1954, 12.52 P.M. When I found out that I had missed lunch, I gave such a shout that the Earth stopped and spun backwards two days. That's why I celebrate my birthday...
Even when I was a kid, I had a good thing with kids. To this day, if I go to a birthday party with one of my kids, I swear to you, I am so much happier hanging out with my kids and their friends than talking to the grown-ups.
By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer for the American Labor Party, and my political thi...
I had sort of had a 21st birthday when I was 17, 18 years old living in Japan. I had all of that stuff sort of happen earlier for me, which happens to a lot of people. My 21st birthday was just a little boring. Not a great story.
For me, ancestry is just one thing that connects us to people, and feeling connected to other people is generally a good thing, as long as one kind of connection does not have primacy over all the others. Heredity, race and nationhood are not the bes...
Many people we consider legends, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, remain so scarred by scandals, injustices and regrets from decades earlier that they're barely able to appreciate their accomplishments.
In 2001, my father finally succumbed to the bone cancer that had tortured him for seven years. His last weeks were a terrible, black icing on the cake, the agony, the slow twisting, thinning and snapping of his skeleton. Everything fell apart.
It is a weird thing, because most people tend to get more conservative as they get older, but I find myself going the opposite way. I am sure that by the end I will be selling Marxist pamphlets on the Holloway Road.
Most Scots might be able to identify six vegetables - but only two MSPs. There are parts of Scotland where you rarely get more than 40% turnout at the polls. There's a big disconnect there, and I think comedians bridge that gap.
With comics, you've got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can't make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn't want all that detail; it interferes with the flow of the reading process.
We were always drawing comics as kids. My brother Charles made me draw comics. I was very much under his domination. He was actually a much stronger artistic visionary than I was.
People still make me nervous, but gradually over the years I've developed kind of like a public personality, so I can talk. I have my spiel, I have my stories.
I was singing a lot of waltzes. And I was with Jerry Kennedy, my producer, and he was playing me some songs, and he said, hey, I want to play you this song that I'm going to get Jackie Ward to record.
What having a Down's syndrome child isn't - and I feel very strongly about this - is a tragedy. All those pregnancy books you read when you are expecting refer to Down's syndrome as if it were the worst possible outcome, and it's not.
It was not a friendly game, and Jerry certainly did not have friendliness in his eyes. He had an extra mean streak that day. He was out of control and probably should have been ejected.
I grew up loving David Letterman and Pee-wee Herman, but as far as live performance comedy, all I knew were the Jerry Seinfeld-type comedians of the world, and that's what I thought live performance comedy was all about.
A lot of drive is innate, self-perpetuated, reinforced energy. As a kid, I could always sell anything I could get my hands on - from newspapers to lemonade to 'TV Guide.' I knew how to make a presentation.
The character of the monkey just grew from something out of his face and my granddad's personality. They fused, and that's what I ended up with! The monkey belonged to a friend of mine, and I saw that it had such a little beguiling face and it grew f...
I think I've got it pretty easy compared with somebody who works at a desk nine to five. I'm just working for an hour in the evening. I get a bit breathless, as I have to talk non-stop because of the puppets.
