What motivated me? My mother. My mother was an immigrant woman, a peasant woman, struggled all her life, worked in the garment center.

I was an organizer in the Food, Agricultural and Tobacco Workers Union down in North Carolina.

I have an old brain but a terrific memory.

America gets the politicians they deserve. That's it. And you keep struggling.

I think people need housing. And there's empty buildings, I think people should live in there. If you want to call them squatters, trespassers, hey, I call Wall Street thieves!

Every Friday I used to have about fifty, sixty kids who would wait for me on Sunset Boulevard and I'd take them all to dinner. All runaways.

I probably worked every single entertainment medium, including some that don't exist. I worked the circus, carnival, I had my own medicine show, I worked 18 years of radio.