I'm very at ease, and I like it. I never thought I would be such a family-oriented guy; I didn't think that was part of my makeup. But somebody said that as you get older you become the person you always should have been, and I feel that's happening to me. I'm rather surprised at who I am, because I'm actually like my dad!
The kindness and affection from the public have carried me through some of the most difficult periods, and always your love and affection have eased the journey.
Daddy - I remember when he first let me drive the cultivator for him, you know... He eased you into the hard work that you had to do later.
If I'm going to get hit, why let the guy who's going to hit me get the easiest and best shot? I explode into the guy who's trying to tackle me.
When I first started fighting, it wasn't the easiest thing. I didn't have all the money in the world. I was eating Subway once in a while, some packets of oatmeal here and there. It wasn't that bad, but it's because I was fortunate and had good people there to support me.
I always wanted to wrestle, but when you're a kid, how do you do pro wrestling? For me, it seemed like the easiest way for me was to get into amateur wrestling and go that route because it was a place where I was allowed to go.
Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.
In fact, it struck me when we invaded last year that if we did it without European and East Asian support, we were risking losing our alliance in Europe in exchange for Iraq, and that is a very undesirable exchange.
When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist.
For me, personally, Detroit is a melting pot for everything. We get the best from the East Coast, West Coast and down South.
I certainly wasn't able to get it when I was a kid growing up on the Lower East Side; it was very hard at that time for me to balance what I really believed was the right way to live with the violence I saw all around me - I saw too much of it among the people I knew.
I'm a black lady from the Lower East Side of New York. Not a lot intimidates me.
My grandparents used to tell me stories about their trip to Ellis Island from Russia and life on the Lower East Side of New York.
I had the advantage of reading the book, and when the script was first submitted to me, it was just another gangster story - the east side taking over the west side and all that.
I live in the East Village, and occasionally people will recognize me there. When I'm in Williamsburg, I always get recognized. Midtown, not so much.
I could've shot the whole East Village, because it was and is my neighborhood. But Seventh Street is precious to me.
Easter is very important to me, it's a second chance.
I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.
I don't know how much more what I've done is any more important than what Ella Fitzgerald did. Ella crossed those lines, as did George Benson before me. There've been lots of people who brought a pop audience to jazz because they were able to link the two and give people easy access to the world of jazz.
The childhood games ended for me when I was 14 and I finished school. I had to find a job, not an easy thing in those days.
