I stand up for what I believe. I don't know if it's always paid off for me, because I've been ridiculed and humiliated.
You have no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes, your toys, snatched by the bailiff. I mean we were a middle-class family, it's not as if it was happening up and down the street. It made me ashamed, I felt dirty.
Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.
I believe the Negro blood counts, and counts to my advantage - though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow.
What humility does for one is it reminds us that there are people before me. I have already been paid for. And what I need to do is prepare myself so that I can pay for someone else who has yet to come but who may be here and needs me.
I'm always writing something. I've got so much stuff, I don't know what to do with it. Some of it will be Strokes, some of it will be I don't know what - stuff for pop singers. TV themes. I've got a jar stuffed with songs, all these ideas that are just me humming into a recording device.
One reason I didn't trust my writing for so long was that I always considered myself a serious dramatic actor. But people would always laugh when I shared my writing with them. It took my husband to help me see that I really am part humorist.
Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.
Professional humorists and cartoonists have to go through a stage in which they have to kill their own internal editor just so they can get stuff out. So whether they believe it or not, they need me on the other end to do that editing for them.
I'm a Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic. It's a humorous way for me to describe that I'm not stereotypical.
I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.
I feel like my life has been very serendipitous and really kind of humorous. Everything that's happened to me has been like an, 'Omigod, are you kidding me?'
Tell me what you do with the food you eat, and I'll tell you who you are. Some turn their food into fat and manure, some into work and good humour, and others, I'm told, into God. So there must be three sorts of men.
That's where humour lives for me. In the body. The Steve Martin kind of stuff or Jim Carrey, that's what I like. I've always felt that's what I would like to do.
I'd love to stay in baseball, but I won't beg. I'd love to work with young umpires. I think I could teach them, help them develop. I can spot flaws, help them get over the hump. You're striving for perfection every game, yet you never achieve it. If baseball wants me, I'm available.
The thing that got me over the hump was accepting that I had to do whatever I could to stay in the game.
My first couple of years in the league left me very unstable. I had some times where I played well, and I had some times were I really did not get the opportunity. After Rick Pitino gave up on me my first year, people were like, 'He can't play.' So I had to get over that hump.
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.
I meet hundreds of people, and I'm not going to remember them. But every single one of them will remember their interaction with me.
I am not involved in any 'issues' because it's too sensitive for me - or my wife - to get involved. Every time we express an opinion it becomes a whole thing in itself. And the whole purpose of living in the countryside was to get away from hundreds of people. My wife fell off a horse, and suddenly there are hundreds of people around.
