Coming home, we stopped for a bite to eat and ran into a confused waitress. Had a heart-rending time trying to speak the Words of Life to her, and as I think of all this country now, many just as confused, and more so, I realized that the 39th Street bus is as much a mission field as Africa ever was.
The hardest thing about my job isn't the snake bites or the crocodiles, it's being away from my children. I have a really religious satellite phone call every day back to the boys, wherever we are, whatever time zone, to say goodnight.
Whether we notice it or not, we spend our days negotiating for something: for our spouse to do more housework, a child to eat just three more bites or go to bed on time, an extended deadline on a project, a salary increase, a better rate on a vacation package.
Some comedians will tour and do these classic bits all the time. But now with YouTube and Comedy Central, people see your stuff, and they don't want to hear you do that again.
I used to love looking at a recipe, getting all the bits and pieces in the shops, getting them ready and prepared... I don't really have the time to do that anymore.
When you're writing a story in bits and pieces, month in and month out, there really isn't time or space for reflection, no room to learn what those scripts had to teach you.
I was molded, spent my time underneath a lot of goo. And then the bits and pieces were sculpted. It took probably 10 days to create each character after all those camera tests.
The entrepreneurial bug had already bitten my son Ankur by the time he got to college. As a lifelong entrepreneur, I certainly didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm by telling him he couldn't do it, but I also wanted to make sure it was balanced with the proper attention to his studies.
To me, when people say, 'Oh, you're a freak athlete,' it's bittersweet. It's a huge compliment to say, 'O.K., you have physical abilities that are kind of above and beyond.' But at the same time, I feel like it diminishes the mental side of the game.
Leaving the space station was bittersweet - I had been there for a long time and looked forward to leaving, but it is a remarkable place.
My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn't really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor.
Any time I hear certain songs I put in a movie, I have to not listen to them anymore because I associate them with that movie. They take on that association rather than the association I had when I first heard them. So it's kinda bittersweet to put a song in a movie, honestly.
You know, rock stardom... I have a hard time discussing that because I don't really accept it. It's not really that tangible. What's really bizarre is how it's used as a thing - you know, 'He's the rock star of politics,' 'He's the rock star of quarterbacks' - like it's the greatest thing in the world.
It's always a problem, getting the curtain in at the end of the first act; having enough of a resolve so that you can bring the curtain in and then opening the show a second time is a little bizarre as a tradition. I've always preferred to go straight through.
I'm seeing the world partially through the eyes of a kid. Not all the time. There's no black and white to it. But sometimes I'm seeing it like I'm 4.
For four to six months at a time, I would barely eat. I lived on a diet of Melba toast, carrots, and black coffee.
My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.
The black community has for a long time been a part of the Hollywood community, and of course we would love to have a more proportionate ratio of films that tell our stories.
I had white family members, black family members, white friends, black friends by the time I was 16.
If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.
