You have to be as light as you can be and not get weighed down and stuck in your emotion, stuck in your body, stuck in your head. You just want to always be trying to elevate somehow.

We're creating a TV show of Scrooge, starring Jamie Farr, with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge. We're shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he's not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we've gotta shoot him at the window, saying, "Go get my boots," or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, "All right, Bud - just give it whatever you want." And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene.

You have to hope that [good things] happen to you. [...] That's the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you'll actually witness, that you'll participate in. Rather than life just rolling over you, and you wake up and it's Thursday, and what happened to Monday? Whatever the best part of my life has been, has been as a result of that remembering.

Totie Fields is one of my benchmarks for a lot of things. There was a standard of show business.

I think there's only so many people that can take care of themselves, and can take care of other people. And the rest of the people … they're useful in terms of compost for the whole planet, you know.

Somewhere there's a score being kept, so you have an obligation to live life as well as you can, be as engaged as you can.

I think we're all sort of imprisoned by - or at least bound to - the choices we make... You want to say no at the right time and you want to say yes more sparingly.