Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.
I had to be sure we were doing something tasteful.
Heather and I decided we were going to be pretty low-key at the convention.
Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
My older brother and I read all the time. My father read, but only things related to religion. One year, he did read a set of stories that was called something like '365 Stories' out loud to us. They followed a family for the year, a page a day. They were about kids with simple problems - like a wheel coming off their bicycle.
People say, When you have children, everything changes. But maybe things are awakened that were already there.
People never understood that there was Brian and The Boz. They were two completely different people.
Funnily enough, when I was leaving school and they asked you what you were going to do, and I just liked acting, that's never what I would say. I would always say I would go into business, even though I didn't really know what was meant by that.
I'd already made the decision before I'd even read it-just because it was John Sayles. Then when I read it, the themes were actually themes that have been a big part of my life.
Once you get a spice in your home, you have it forever. Women never throw out spices. The Egyptians were buried with their spices. I know which one I'm taking with me when I go.
In September, I left the show. We were going through discussions and negotiations, and I had been on the show for about 11 years, and there were some things that I was asking for that I didn't feel were the moon or the stars.
I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.
The movie, if I recall, didn't have to do with the television show because there were concerns from everyone that they didn't want it to be like the TV show.
My own life values were shaped in great part by my mother, who instigated women's clubs in my village. Women were able to organize and stand together. What inspired me most about their work was the power it gave them to assert their rights and the rights of their daughters, be it education or property inheritance.
Although there was a point with the Tijuana Brass where we were playing for such huge crowds that I kind of lost contact. At one point, the only connection I had with the audience was with people out there lighting cigarettes.
I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; but young men think it is, and we were young.
All the other guys I think had a scream on Lock, Stock. They just had a laugh and a crack, and thought it would never come out; they were just having a good time. On this one, I felt that.
I'm the youngest of four, and they were all very into sports. I was the first one to express an interest in the arts. I took piano lessons and singing lessons, acting lessons. So it was all new to them, but my parents were great.
Daddy felt that this country was hopeless in its treatment of Negroes. So he became a refugee from America. He bought a house in Polanco, a suburb of Mexico City, and we were planning to move there when he died. I was fourteen at the time.
We knew the European players that went to the NBA and had great careers, and we knew the ones that went and had terrible careers or finished early. We were prepared for a lot of criticism.
So the laughs had to come from the character, not because we had balloons in our shirts or were speaking in high voices. That was very important to us.
If you were to actually travel around schools and universities and listen in on lectures about evolution, you might find a fairly substantial fraction of young people, without knowing what it is they disapprove of, think they disapprove of it, because they've been brought up to.
We weren't One Hit Wonders. We had a few hits.
I'm not worried about misconception or a perception that's bad. If I were, I'd be chasing something all the time.
If we were motivated by money, we would have sold the company a long time ago and ended up on a beach.
If a writer is to tell his own story - tell it slowly, and as if it were a story about other people - if he is to feel the power of the story rise up inside him, if he is to sit down at a table and patiently give himself over to this art - this craft - he must first have been given some hope.
You know as a scientist that both were developed completely independently of each other in the laboratories. And only afterward were the political situations contrived out of which they could be justified.
I once saw my mother playing Mary Magdalene in a parish event. But she had to put the role aside in order to go and front the choir who were singing at the same occasion. She left the stage halfway through the Crucifixion.
At that time, we were in charge. We didn't ask. We just did. We just did what was in our heart.
And most of these pilots were lost during the first five flights.
A lot of times in Hollywood, when casting directors find out you're of Middle Eastern descent, they go, 'Oh, you're Iranian? Great. Can you say, 'I will kill you in the name of Allah?'' I could say that, but what if I were to say, 'Hello, I'm your doctor.'
I studied chemical engineering. I was a good student, but these were the hard times of the depression, my scholarship came to an end, and it was necessary to work to supplement the family income.
I remember thinking the Nineties were uncool: 'I landed in the generation where nothing happens.'
I grew up in Brooklyn, and my parents were Holocaust survivors, so they never taught me anything about nature, but they taught me a lot about gratitude.
