I met my husband, Will Smith, when I was 19 and auditioned to be his date on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.' They said I was too short to play the part.
You get older, you start meeting girls, you want to impress them. And if you happen to know an instrument, what you do is turn on the radio and try to figure out how to play popular songs.
I didn't have an agent, I didn't have a headshot. I didn't even know if anyone would know where to find me. I just went back to highschool and started playing with my band.
Who wants to miss their opportunity of playing in a Major... A golfer's career is all about it. The lesson I have learnt is that I will tee up for the Majors only when I am 100 percent fit.
A lot of times, you could play me just the laughs from my set, and I could tell you, from the laugh, what the joke was. Because they match.
People recognize me on the street for all kinds of different things that I've done. 'That Thing You Do' remains to be my favorite film in which I played my favorite character. That role is the one that I'm most recognized for.
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
When I left the band I said Look, I am ready to move on. I was interested in playing with some of the other people that I had bee a studio musician with.
I don't think people can watch University of Texas basketball or football games with me - really, anything Texas is playing - without wanting to punch me in the face. I'm as big a Longhorn fan as you'll find.
After playing so many songs in churches for eight or nine years, I've learned what songs people react to. Then I just had fun with the arrangements. That's how this album came together.
I played football in the ninth and 10th grade. I looked a lot like Joe Namath, so I think my looks got me there more than my abilities.
I would play my Dungeons and Dragons songs and watch people's eyes glaze over, and then I would start joking around between songs, and all of a sudden people were lighting up and engaging.
I never want to sell my soul for something I don't believe in. Because guess what? Somebody somewhere in the world would have believed in that part and should be playing it - who am I to not allow that person that opportunity?
I was sent the script for 'Silver Linings' when I was doing a play in D.C. at The Kennedy Center with Cate Blanchett and I was sent the script and asked if I was interested, and I said 'Oh, boy am I!'
I've done a lot of plays before where I had to do a New York accent, but never a Philly one before. They do the rhotic 'r' - where you say the 'r' - where most New Yorkers don't.
We have a secret project at Third Man where we want to have the first vinyl record played in outer space. We want to launch a balloon that carries a vinyl record player.
If you want to put out a million CDs and sell them and get them played on the radio, and even videos, or whatever, if that still exists, that kind of muscle can only come from a label like Columbia.
I don't play lovers. I wish I did. At least once I'd like to have a crack at one of those guys. A heartbreaker. Some people are born to it. I'm not.
Our enemies and our would-be enemies are working very hard at cyberterrorism... They're trying to level the playing field because they know they can't beat us tank for tank, plane for plane.
In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.
When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.
