My grandparents from the old country, Latvia, were all musical on my father's side.

Often, entertainment goes deeper, in terms of ideas, than the newspapers.

My father was a musician and wanted me to study piano. I had no interest.

I was so successful in Cleveland, and we moved to Los Angeles, and there was nothing for me to do. All of a sudden, from being a success, I was a has-been at 13.

My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.

It can take me forever to choose the right coffee cup in the morning. And it does make a difference!

I love that moment just before the curtain goes up, whether I'm sitting in the audience or standing backstage. It's full of expectation. It's a thrill that's unequaled anywhere.

I don't want to do material that I don't like. I've always stuck to that policy. If that means being out of work for awhile, that's fine with me.

My mother named me after her favorite actor, Joel McCrea, and dressed and presented me as her avatar. I'm sure she wanted to be a performer, but when that was impossible, I was her next best shot.

I've always wanted to do, oddly enough, a live variety show, but only with a live audience.

When I met Jo Wilder, I fell crazy in love and never thought about homosexuality. And I thought, 'Well, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is life.'

Larry Hagman and I are very old friends.

There is nothing I enjoy more than doing my show.

If you don't tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise.

My father was Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones and then went on to improvise some successful Yiddish parodies, some of which I perform. My favorite was 'Geshray of the Vilde Kotchke,' his version of 'Cry of the Wild Goose.'

After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.

When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered 'Bar Mitzvah Ranch' to sing 'Home on the Range' in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, 'I want to be an American.'

I think I'd be too scared to direct my first movie and put myself in the center.

One of the great joys of being able to write something you can make, if you get certain actors you want and love, you're kind of buying yourself a front row seat to watch them work.

I had a brother who was bullying me to write something because we wanted to make our own movies. So it was out of necessity in the beginning. Over time, I began to see that I could create the roles I wanted to play rather than just waiting around.

Fighting in the ring or cage is very much different from fighting in the street. Fighting in the street is very much fueled by anger, pride, and male dominance and ego.

I love what I do, but it occurs to me I may have handed over a large portion of my life to fiction.

I just love good movies. And not every movie you're going to end up in is always going to turn out right, but at least walk into it with the right intention.

I just don't want to do crap movies, man, because I just love that I can get up and talk about them and talk to journalists about stuff that I'm really proud of.