I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

Diabetes affects my family. One of my kids is affected by it.

On my visits back home, if they saw that I was getting a big head, they'd let me know right away.

After all, at end of the day, when you're breathing your last, it's not your producer, director, or cast mates by your bedside; it's your children. Keep that in mind.

I'd never been to acting school, so I never thought I'd get this far.

To them, the real United States is just flyover country.

Hollywood has lost touch with their audience a long time ago.

I'm concerned about the insidious influence of the media's bad messages that undermine the lessons parents try to instill in their sons and daughters.

I've turned down projects based on raunchiness before.

I have been raising money for the past 14 years for diabetes research.

There are times over different projects when I've asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren't these swear words.

I started improvising the Cliff character, based on someone I grew up with.

I come from Bridgeport, Connecticut and have friends I grew up with there.

Two days later I got a call that they wanted to try out the character for seven episodes. Eleven years and 22 Emmys later, Cliff was still sitting at that bar.

I always played a soldier, sailor, or policemen.

It appalls me that the people who decide what Americans will be watching on the tube have never been to the United States. Not the real United States.

So many actors have sheer guts, will, and determination; they just need some preparation.

Sure, the comedians who swear or use scatological humor can get laughs, but they're uncomfortable laughs.

They need to be re-supplied with energy, and that energy comes from asking not what your country can do for you, but from what you can do for your country.

From what I can see, too many kids don't learn pride in their country anymore.

Find people who share your values, and you'll conquer the world together.

The last thing on my mind was to be an actor, but I had a crush on a cute girl in the drama department, so the best thing for me to do was audition, help out, do carpentry, whatever it took to get me on that project.

In fact, my son learned his first swear word from E.T. at age five. The way I look at it, E.T. stole a bit of my son's childhood.

A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally.

In L.A., though, people get off busses calling themselves actors, so many are really not professionals.

You've got to write for your audience.

Before 1972, no actors got residuals. They just got paid. No residuals.

When I go to the garage to pick up my clubs, I clean the spider webs off.

The pollution they produce, market, sell, and show to billions around the world is at its core contemptuous of the country that gave them better lives than nearly 100 percent of everybody who's ever lived. And they pass that contempt along for everyone to see.

You'll be tested every single day.

But from what I can see all around me today, that America is fading fast, if it's not already gone.

There are technologies you couldn't predict at all when I started.

So many people aren't ready for Hollywood - professionally or practically.

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.

It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

Because I killed a guy in real life, and because my character kills a guy onstage, they said I could never do anything this great again. I resented that.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I just kind of understood it, and I threw my love for others and love for life into the character, and was having a blast. I loved playing Dharma. I loved it!

I think if you play a character that is fearless, then it's boring. I think that's what was so incredible about Harrison Ford, is that he always seemed like he was never going to survive it, he's always scared, and yet he always does survive it somehow.