We're not earthly beings any more... we're cosmic beings. For days after death hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off. When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses. I think happiness comes from self-acceptance. We all try different things, and we find some comfortable sense of who we are. We look at our parents and learn and grow and move on. We change. I only work with actors who take full responsibility for their characters. Here's what I tell anybody and this is what I believe. The greatest gift we have is the gift of life. We understand that. That comes from our Creator. We're given a body. Now you may not like it, but you can maximize that body the best it can be maximized. That still has to be there. And so, it's kind of an interesting question you brought up. Because, on the one hand, yeah, it'd be lovely. I certainly don't see that happening. In fact, I see the opposite happening. Sweat plus sacrifice equals success. Well, listen, you know, the Czech saying is, you know, when you are drowning you are grabbing even a little twig. That's what all Czechs were doing, grabbing for... with the hope for this little twig. Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for. Horrible things happen, but were they horrible? No, they were just circumstances of the world. Life stands before me like an eternal spring with new and brilliant clothes. So when I got to 50 I just thought, Hold on: I'm thin. I've got my hair. I'm well off. I survived, you know. I am pretty much a sucker any really bad reality television. It definitely helps to have been through the arm training flow before and to have used the arm on orbit, and it also gives me the confidence to know that our training facilities are really good, that when you get up there, you feel like you've been there. I thought I couldn't afford to take her out and smoke as well. So I gave up cigarettes. Then I took her out and one day I looked at her and thought: "Oh well," and I went back to smoking again, and that was better. Nothing to be done really about animals. Anything you do looks foolish. The answer isn't in us. It's almost as if we're put here on earth to show how silly they aren't. Not a single man on earth knows from his own experience the how and where of his birth, only from tradition, which is often very uncertain. When I was nine years old I use to copy ( not trace ) the covers of the Donald Duck comics. Many years later I became a close friend of Jack Hannah, the director of the Donald Duck film shorts. I have fun at work. The faces in New York remind me of people who played a game and lost. If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen. My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write. I loved playing the part of the feisty Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker. If you're suddenly doing something you don't want to do for four years, just so you've got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don't have that 16-year-old drive any more and you'll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place. Money is neither my god nor my devil. It is a form of energy that tends to make us more of who we already are, whether it's greedy or loving. AIDS is a global problem and there should be a global solution found by the entire international community. It is really scary to see and imagine our world fall into pieces because we refuse to share and put in the common vestiges of our civilizations. Wealth is conspicuous, but poverty hides. And yet because of my attempt at sincerity I have been condemned, hooted at, reviled; filthy rumors have been circulated about me, not about my characterizations but about me personally, my private self. Life and death. They are somehow sweetly and beautifully mixed, but I don't know how. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. I've learned over a period of years there are setbacks when you come up against the immovable object; sometimes the object doesn't move.