If 'Life in Marvelous Times' can't get on the radio, then I don't need to be on the radio.
Who could have imagined that life would have taken such marvelous twists and turns or that I would often be so fortunate to be in the right place at the right time?
Growing up in the projects, I've been around music all my life. Marvin Gaye, everything man.
I don't need no stool and mike stand. I don't need all of that to be funny. I've been funny my whole life. This is a gift God gave me. I spread love wherever I'm at. I'm like Marvin Gaye.
I'd always heard stories about how Harpo Marx was the most talkative of the Marx brothers. I found it interesting that someone you never got to hear speak in films would never not speak in real life.
I am a Marxist Leninist and I will be one until the last day of my life.
Did you ever notice the color of Mary Poppins' petticoats? They were kind of orange and apricot and red. I think she had a secret life going on there.
'Mary Poppins' was one of the best experiences of my life.
I think the idea of 'Mary Poppins' has been blowing in and out of me, like a curtain at a window, all my life.
Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
I watched a lot of old television growing up - a lot of Nick at Nite. I watched 'Rhoda', 'Mary Tyler Moore', and 'I Love Lucy.' Growing up, I loved 'My So Called Life' and was devastated when that went off the air.
It's love. It's two men - two strong, very virile men - finding that space in life where they can let go enough of their masculinity to feel the passion of love and respect and trust. Friendships are based on those things, and you seal it with a kiss.
The pattern of a newspaperman's life is like the plot of 'Black Beauty.' Sometimes he finds a kind master who gives him a dry stall and an occasional bran mash in the form of a Christmas bonus, sometimes he falls into the hands of a mean owner who drives him in spite of spavins and expects him to live on potato peelings.
Life's too short and too complicated for people behind desks, people behind masks to be ruining other people's lives, initiating force against other people's lives on the basis of their income, their color, their class, their religious beliefs, whatever.
This might sound masochistic or narcissistic, I don't know, but when I'm not playing the game, the validations I feel about life are always through the hardships. I relate more to sadness, in a lot of ways, when I'm not playing.
Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life.
That's the magic of art and the magic of theatre: it has the power to transform an audience, an individual, or en masse, to transform them and give them an epiphanal experience that changes their life, opens their hearts and their minds and the way they think.
I think losing your mother at such a young age does end up shaping your life massively. Of course it does, and now I find myself trying to be there and give advice to other people who are in similar positions.
One of the accidental joys of my writing life has been that I've had some lovely, surprisingly good fortune with readers, and I've brought readers to my dad's work. I can't tell you the joy that gives me. Because my father's work was masterful.
The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.
