On September 22, 2002, my mama, Buhlar Hinton, died. When the guards told me, I gave up. She'd been deteriorating for a long time - I believe she died of a broken heart.
It took me realizing that a broken heart has never actually killed anyone to find the courage to ask for what I want, in just about every situation. That was part of my own growing up.
When David left me I became totally brokenhearted.
God is close to the brokenhearted, and God lifts up the lonely. That was a message that was explicitly quoted to me and was part of my upbringing: Brokenhearted people and poor people and people who are in trouble should be your focus, and you should be on their team.
I told myself a while back, 'Love what you do, but don't fall in love with what you do.' That way you won't be brokenhearted if ever it gets canceled five episodes in - which has happened to me.
One day, walking through the Bronx streets, I just realized that people were stopping me, taking pictures, and noticing me from across the street. I can't even use public transportation anymore, so I kind of stopped going places and started going straight to the studio, going home, and telling people I can't go anywhere anymore.
My early childhood prepared me to be a social psychologist. I grew up in a South Bronx ghetto in a very poor family. From Sicilian origin, I was the first person in my family to complete high school, let alone go to college.
Winning is great, but being able to finish my last Olympic Games on American soil was very important. Even though I was injured, I didn't let my psyche get the best of me and cause me to doubt myself, so I was willing to pull every muscle in my body in '96 in order to get the job done and I came away with the bronze medal.
I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname.
I always have my journal with me. It was handmade by a guy at the San Telmo market in Buenos Aires. If you go there he can make you one. It's leather and bronze and I'm able to replace the paper when it runs out. It has a lion on the cover that I say is there to protect my thoughts.
You can keep the things of bronze and stone and give me one man to remember me just once a year.
My father, a mining engineer and colliery manager, gave his brood many advantages not least of which, for me, was his love of singing which gave music a central place in our lives.
For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.
I remember my first review in London said I was the next Peter Brook. I said: 'No way. I'm not Peter Brook. I don't have the maturity, the experience, the intelligence. Don't burden me.'
I'm shooting in Brooklyn, we've got all kinds of crap going on, and I'm all alone now in a big hotel suite that you can't believe the size of it and a thing sticks in my foot and I just think it's the funniest thing that's ever happened to me.
'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.
There's an army story in me, and I think there's a WWII Brooks film somewhere.
Silence in the turmoil of the theater world made me survive 50 years without speaking on a stage, only to say 'No' in Mel Brooks' film, 'Silent Movie.'
I grew up on Mel Brooks films. That was film to me until I got a little bit older and realised there were other kinds of movies.
I had been drawing my weekly comic strip, 'Life in Hell,' for about five years when I got a call from Jim Brooks, who was developing 'The Tracey Ullman Show' for the brand-new Fox network. He wanted me to come in and pitch an idea for doing little cartoons on that show.
