I'm one of the handful of survivors of the guys I came up with.

After we did [All In The Family], that ended up being a real love fest all around. Me and Norman, Norman [Lear] and me, Rob Reiner, everybody liked everybody. So about six or seven months later I moved out to L.A. and I got a call that Norman wanted to see me. I came in and he said "ABC has given me a property that they just optioned to make into a TV series. It's from a play called Hot L Baltimore, and I want you to be in it."

I have to say I was very lucky in this [movie] business. I was in the right place at the right time when I first got started.

The difference between deafness and any other disability is that there is no way to put yourself in a position of knowing what it would be like because you can't stop yourself from hearing your own breath or your own heartbeat. You can not remove sound entirely from your life. You can get a sense of what being blind is like by closing and covering your eyes which provides a source of empathy because we can all project ourselves to that. But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't.

If people don't actively knock the scenery over and they get the words out in something approximating the right order, you're moving on.

I had a very low voice for the character in the show. I said, "That's not actually my voice. That's the character's voice." I'm being such an actor.

I did a film many years ago called The Man Without A Face.Gaby [Hoffmann] was in with Mel Gibson. That was his directing debut. He did a great job.