A father is a person who's around participating in a child's life. He's a teacher who helps to guide and shape and mold that young person someone for that young person to talk to to share with their ups and their downs their fears and their concerns.

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal because if you lose it then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel I try and fill up notepads.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black woman mother dyke teacher etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.

A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.

Okay so sometimes in life I can be a score-keeper - someone who keeps track of what he gives and what he gets in return. An annoying quality to say the least and I'm sure my wife has your sympathy but it's made me highly attuned to when and where credit is due.

I don't think it's an incredibly radical premise to try and have sympathy for someone who has made a mistake.

There's something very beautiful and compelling about someone who has ambition and someone who knows what they want but it can get a little frustrating at times so I understand that. I have sympathy for that.

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

It would be a joy for me if someone who was working with me became a big success.

The worst part of success is to try finding someone who is happy for you.

For someone who's had the level of success I've had there's been very little critical review of my work which is pretty fascinating.

We're constantly striving for success fame and comfort when all we really need to be happy is someone or some thing to be enthusiastic about.

It's a wonderful side effect of what we're doing to give someone the strength to come out of the closet to their family or simply present themselves aesthetically in a way they feel happy with whether or not their friends are going to be allowed to like them anymore.

The opponents and I are really one. My strength and skills only half of the equation. The other half is theirs. An opponent is someone whose strength joined to yours creates a certain result.

And partly the worst thing you could do in my family was need something from someone. So physical strength represented an avenue of self-sufficiency to me.

But I really like hosting I think it's a strength of mine. It allows me to improvise and I love the spontaneity of that and I think I'm funny behind the desk when interviewing someone.

Tina Turner is someone that I admire because she made her strength feminine and sexy.

It's always difficult to play a scene of physical violence because you're always afraid that you don't know your own strength and might hurt someone.

As a kid I was short and only weighed 95 pounds. And though I was active in a lot of Sports and got along with most of the guys I think I used comedy as a defense mechanism. You know making someone laugh is a much better way to solve a problem than by using your fists.

One of the most difficult things for people who have been successful in sports is adapting to the daily world where you can't get an answer from someone until 5 o'clock tomorrow. There is always an excuse. Living 40 or 50 years like that doesn't get too exciting after a while.

I think having a vision can make someone an influential man. I'm not talking about acting or anything like that I'm talking about people I admire whether it's a writer or a musician or a sports figure or a politician whatever.

I don't want someone to watch sports in bed. That drives me nuts.

I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball I want someone else to go chase it.