Everyone kept telling me, Just be yourself. Be yourself. I kept thinking, there's got to be more to it than that!

Don't try too hard to be young. Be who you are.

Hold back the tide. Keep your kids innocent as long as possible.

Sometimes it's like watching a train wreck. You're uncomfortable, but you just can't help yourself. Some of those so-called bad interviews actually turned into compelling television.

The joke I wanted to put into one of the promos for this new season, was to have a guy come up to me and say, Hey! Tony! I love your show, I've watched you every night since you started! And then I'd say, Ah! You're the one!

Everyone kept telling me, Just be yourself. Be yourself. I kept thinking, there's got to be more to it than that!

I love to cook and I know a lot of people watching love those segments, but so often they feel rushed to me. If we give 'em a bit more time to breathe, people will get more out of them.

I did Vibe, and I felt old and paternal. I've got ties older than people in that audience. I had a talk with myself. I said, You've got to deal with this better.

I got this call that they wanted me to join this cast. They called it a family show, and it thought that it would be similar to all family shows. I wasn't sure about this until I watched some tapes, and was amazed.

I am looking forward to getting to do things I have never done before.

In an earthquake, I shouldn't run out of the house - I should run into it.

We did 112 shows and had 112 parties.

We are cutting things kids like-music, art, and gym classes; stuff that kept me in school. This country can't survive without you kids. It's all about you kids.

I always wanted to be a teacher. I went to school to be a teacher. And I've always, you know, had this sort of romantic idea about it. But I'm worried about - I'm worried about education.

I am a singer and dancer, and I've been perfecting it for a lot of years.

I love to make soups. My father used to say, 'There's nothing like a nice bowl of soup.' One of my favorites is... ready? Broccolini, white bean and hot Italian sausage soup. I've used escarole. Escarole in beans is unbelievable, or you can use bok choy, any kind. You can really fool around. That's one of my good ones.

I think like a lot of people, you look back on your life and say, 'Gee, why didn't I apply myself?' If I would have spent as much time studying as I did conniving, trying to do as little as possible, I probably would have got the A's.

I was training in Gleason's Gym on 30th and 8th Avenue, where it was the Mecca of boxing, and a guy walked in who couldn't rub two quarters together and said, 'Did you ever think of being on TV?' And somehow I ended up in 'Taxi,' which is the craziest thing of all.

I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. But I had gotten in a lot of fights 'cause in the neighborhood I grew up in, that wasn't equated with bad behavior almost. I mean, we'd fought like it was another game. 'You wanna play stick ball today?' 'Nah, let's go fight.'

I worked at an old folks' home once in Harlem, and I was an activities volunteer. I used to do all these plays with the old people. I did 'The Wizard of Oz;' it was adapted. There was a guy there who played the harmonica, so we had an overture, and The Wizard was 96.

I'm a union guy; I've always been. I've been in SAG 35 years; my father was a garbage man, a sanitation man, for the city, a union guy.

I'm an American songbook guy, though I've got eclectic tastes. I really love the American songbook. I've taken up the ukulele, and so you can play 'Five Foot Two' and Hawaiian music, but you can also do some of the great tunes, like 'You Go to My Head,' 'I Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,' 'Taking a Chance on Love.'

The great thing about getting married young like I did and having a child so young is that he gets to know all the relatives. He knew his great-grandmother, and we sat down together and tied down the stories of our uncles and aunts. They were quite the characters, and we tied them to about 50 recipes. It's like a memoir-cookbook.

The part in 'Taxi' was originally written for a guy named Phil Ryan, so they made it Phil Banta, and then they made it Tony Banta, which sounded a lot better anyway.

There was a time when watching a cartoon was a nurturing experience. You would watch a Warner Bros. cartoon, and at the end of it you could probably win 'Jeopardy.'

This culture is sort of antithetical in everything it says to the kids. I don't want to pick on 'Jersey Shore,' but it's pretty clear. I would tell the kids good behavior and hard work will pay off, and then they go home and watch TV and go, 'Oh, that's not true.'

What happened is, when I was doing 'Taxi,' the last year, we did this thing where we had on top hats and tails, and we pretended to tap-dance. And I said to myself, 'You know, I always wanted to know how to do this.' So I got myself a teacher, and I started studying, and I got hooked.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I am aware of changes gradually taking place in my own designs as part of my thinking on this matter.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

I started thinking about my relationship with my students; I'm this guy who comes in from book - and movie - land and descends on angel wings into their classroom.

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

I don't know, I think, in times where I'm really nervous, and I'm really under the pressure the worst possible outcome is for me to start thinking about it.

For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

In thinking about nanotechnology today, what's most important is understanding where it leads, what nanotechnology will look like after we reach the assembler breakthrough.

Conservatism has had from its inception vigorously positive, intellectually rigorous agenda and thinking. That agenda should have in my three pillars: strengthen the economy, strengthen our security, and strengthen our families.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.

All of this got me thinking about the history of the westward expansion, and got me to wondering how the exploration of the Solar System would be changed if there were an indigenous presence out there.

Romance, like the rabbit at the dog track, is the elusive, fake, and never attained reward which, for the benefit and amusement of our masters, keeps us running and thinking in safe circles.

We don't focus as much in schools on educational knowledge which requires thinking and application, as we do on acquiring facts.

Einstein was a man who could ask immensely simple questions. And what his work showed is that when the answers are simple too, then you can hear God thinking.

It is, therefore, essential that we guard our own thinking and not be among those who cry out against prejudices applicable to themselves, while busy spawning intolerances for others.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

I went backwards and forwards over it until I was 22. And then in the past few years I began to say to myself, OK, look, I'm not messing around. This is something I want to attack, instead of thinking, I'll just see what happens with it.

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.