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.

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.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.