My parents have always been offended by my weight, embarrassed maybe. It didn't fit with their sensibilities.

When it comes to boys and her weight, I think Ellenor is much more conservative than I am, and she has not had the dialogue I have had about my weight.

One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.

Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.

In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it.

So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.

So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.

It's important to me that I look good on television because, let's face it, I'm single, and you want somebody to watch the show and fall in love with you.

Nobody else knew what to do with me because big women are old.

I've always thought of fat as just a descriptive word.

On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people.

I think the play actually became bigger than me. No pun intended.

I hate overweight, because it implies that there's a weight standard I should be adhering to.

I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.

When I meet large women who walk with confidence and are articulate and really have an understanding of how they walk in this world, I love them so deeply for being able to overcome such unbelievable odds.

Isn't it amazing how celebrity status preempts even the most ingrained hatreds?

I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.

I think Ellenor is embarrassed and ashamed and has devoted all of her energy to the law and to helping other people get justice because it's too difficult for her to face her own struggle for justice.

One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.

Almost everything I do is related to being fat.

Years ago women of my size were considered royalty.

My parents have always been offended by my weight, embarrassed maybe. It didn't fit with their sensibilities.

For a long time, I really struggled with the idea of being an actor because I really felt that I should be in the Peace Corps.

Waiting, waiting, waiting. All my life, I've been waiting for my life to begin, as if somehow my life was ahead of me, and that someday I would arrive at it.

Both of my parents are professors and everyone in my family has some fabulous degree of something or another and I couldn't get into college because I didn't know a language.

Handsome, thin, sophisticated men often fall madly in love with larger women, we just never see it on TV.

It's okay to be a fat man. It's prestige and power and all of that. But fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.

I was scared, because I knew that in the political arena, you have to satisfy so many different types of people at once, and I wasn't sure that I could speak for everybody and be politically correct.

I placed over a thousand deaf people in jobs throughout my career working for the deaf.

The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.

I don't even like to be naked in front of myself!

The way I see it, I can either cross the street, or I can keep waiting for another few years of green lights to go by.

People in this country haven't stopped hating fat people, but they've become more kind to me, since in our culture, even though we hate our fat people, we love our celebrities even more.

It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.

Instead of hating, I have chosen to forgive and spend all of my positive energy on changing the world.

Parents know how to push your buttons because hey they sewed them on.

So to me fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.

Self-acceptance begets acceptance from others, which begets even deeper, more genuine self-acceptance. It can be done. But no one is going to bestow it on you. It is a gift only you can give yourself.

Yes, I am Algerian of Moroccan origin through my parents, but all my life is Algeria. I was born there.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

We're parents first, and once you have kids, everybody knows that you have priority lists. Number one is your family and everything else just kind of finds its place.

The education of my brother and myself was of paramount importance to my parents, and in addition to their strong encouragement, they were prepared to make any sacrifice to further our intellectual development.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

My sister and I were born in San Francisco. When our parents died, we came down here to live with relatives.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

It's up to each person's parents whether they think it's too frightening or too violent, how much their kids can handle, what they want to teach them, what they want to show them.

I'd hope to reach any kid who feels apart from the group - those who seem to be outsiders, who feel different. Kids who want to reach their parents often don't know how to do so.

That other saying, I'm a part of all that I have met, I think that would have to begin with my wonderful parents back in Atlanta when I was a youngster five years old I was tongue tied.

I have parents come up to me and say, 'I don't know who you are, but my kid wants his picture taken with you.'