I'm a positive thinker and actor. I look at a glass; a negative person sees the glass and says: too bad it's half empty... I look at the same glass and say: Hallelujah!! It's half full!!!

I like to go back and read poems that I wrote fifty years ago, twenty years ago, and sometimes they surprise me - I didn't know I knew that then. Or maybe I didn't know it then, and I know more now.

I want to be representative of my race-the human race. I have a chance to show how kind we can be, how intelligent and generous we can be.

It's so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I've never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.

All of childhood's unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.

We are growing up. We are growing up! Out of the idiocies - the ignorances of racism and sexism and ageism and all those ignorances.