I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.

You go to Main Street, and Wal-Mart is coming to town and kicking out all the mom and pop stores. All the people that were in the mom and pop stores are now working for Wal-Mart.

Playing Bill Clinton is really, probably, the scariest time of my career.

I don't know if I'd want to be a Secret Service agent. In the movies, it's exciting and romantic and all that. Really, most of their job is standing in a hallway for 12 hours making sure somebody doesn't come through a doorway off of a stairwell.

A common defense among obituary-fanciers such as myself is that the obit is not about death at all. It is about life. This is true since an article about the condition of deadness would make for turgid reading at best.

There are so many cruel decisions parents have to make when their child dies. The funeral director requested a sheet for the coffin, and I sent the cozy flannel one, pale blue with happy snowmen, that had just been put away with the winter linens.

Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.

The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.