I really think I ambled through a lot of my life, or ambled from one thing to the other.
There is not enough magic in a bloodline to forge an instant, irrevocable bond.
And I think, on the other end, there were actors who were not as good as I was, perhaps who could have hung in too, but began to blame everything on race.
I think self-criticism is sort of a given when you're an actor. It's also about being curious and not being flippant. Anyone who accepts being in this noble profession is automatically self-critical.
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the perilous mythology of race.
Writing can give full meaning to characters and avoid pure stereotype.
I was an adopted child of my grandparents, and I don't know how I can ever express my gratitude for that, because my parents would have been a mess, you know.
You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
We children learned responsibility automatically.
So in my sophomore year, I took a senior anatomy class. I thought anatomy - being the thing that I should be most interested in - and if I could hack, as we called it, a senior class, I would continue. I didn't hack the senior class.
So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
So I was determined to use my last two years in college doing something I thought I would enjoy, which was acting. And it was probably because there was girls over in the drama school too, you know?
So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.
Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
One day, my youngest uncle - the other one who was first to go to college, Randy - and I were sitting out on the front porch. And he was brilliant. He ended up - he just retired from Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas.
No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.
My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being.
It has to be real, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society is because we don't acknowledge that family is important, and it has to be people who are present, you know, and mothers and fathers, both are not present enough with children.
In the wintertime, in the snow country, citrus fruit was so rare, and if you got one, it was better than ambrosia.
