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

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.'

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 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.

Struggle is always very demoralising. It's not a romantic phase in anybody's life. It's very difficult. What it does is, it brings out your creativity in different way.

Moral training in Ireland is severe and lasts until marriage. Even in childhood, we are taught by the pious clergy to battle against bad thoughts so that we may preserve our holy purity.

It is certainly true that writers take a stance at some variance from organized religion. This has not always been true. But since the romantic movement - and I'm referring now exclusively to poetry - the emphasis has been on the individual imagination defined against, rather than in terms of, any orthodoxy.

I thought that I was going to be Mrs. Michael Jackson, but I was ready at 20 and 21 to get married, and he was not even close to getting married or having a girlfriend at that time, but yes, we dated. We dated for a while.