For lack of any clearer idea, I just started acting one day. It had been in the back of my head for a while, but I think in some ways I was afraid to do it, and finally I just stepped up.

I like New York because you're kind of forced to smell everybody else's funk. So it keeps you biologically attached to the world around you.

When you go to a restaurant, the less you know about what happens in the kitchen, the more you enjoy your meal.

I like to do theater and hopefully be effective. Most actors, at least contemporary actors of my generation, can't do it. They don't have the chops.

I think I was afraid of what I might say when I got onto someone's stage or in front of someone's camera.

Shaft was a pop culture figure along t he lines of, I guess, Dirty Harry - except that he wasn't as much of a racist. So yeah, I was always a fan.

The reason why things work is because of love.

Well, I like to be kept on my toes. I look for a challenge. I don't like to recreate steps that I've already walked. I like to see if I can create something new.

As much as we teach our kids, the process teaches us. If we're being diligent, we're learning from our strengths as parents, but also from the mistakes that we make.

New York is the greatest character actor ever. Any film that is shot in New York is elevated by the city.

You're a master on blues piano. The real deal.

Love is the world’s greatest doctor

When you hide the bodies of the problems, that's how you eventually amass skeletons in your closet.

Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

Looking back, now, I realize that you only ever need one person who lights up that way when you enter a room. One person is all it takes to give a kid confidence.

Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.

For me, being leftist means fighting against injustice and inequality but, most of all, we want to live well.

Ive had about 140 albums released, and Ive done everything I wanted to do.

Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word.

Staid middle age loves the hurricane passions of opera.

Theories that diseases are caused by mental states and can be cured by will power, are always an index of how much is not understood about the physical terrain of a disease.