“Almost everything I do is related to being fat.”

“For a long time, I really struggled with the idea of being an actor because I really felt that I should be in the Peace Corps.”

“Handsome, thin, sophisticated men often fall madly in love with larger women, we just never see it on TV.”

“I don't even like to be naked in front of myself!”

“I hate overweight, because it implies that there's a weight standard I should be adhering to.”

“I learned how to sign because when I was growing up in California in order to get into college you needed two semesters of language to get into a University of California school.”

“I placed over a thousand deaf people in jobs throughout my career working for the deaf.”

“I think the play actually became bigger than me. No pun intended.”

“I was scared, because I knew that in the political arena, you have to satisfy so many different types of people at once, and I wasn't sure that I could speak for everybody and be politically correct.”

“Instead of hating, I have chosen to forgive and spend all of my positive energy on changing the world.”

“Isn't it amazing how celebrity status preempts even the most ingrained hatreds?”

“It never occurred to me that I'd be on a television show or in feature films but when those came into play my dreams changed along the way.”

“It's important to me that I look good on television because, let's face it, I'm single, and you want somebody to watch the show and fall in love with you.”

“It's okay to be a fat man. It's prestige and power and all of that. But fat women are seen as just lazy and stupid and having no self-control.”

“My parents have always been offended by my weight, embarrassed maybe. It didn't fit with their sensibilities.”

“On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people.”

“One of my earliest memories is of my father carrying me in one arm with a picket sign in the other.”

“One of the things I did when I was in New York, which has a wonderful deaf community, is I have worked on making Broadway more accessible to deaf people.”

“Parents know how to push your buttons because, hey, they sewed them on.”

“So instead of beating myself up for being fat, I think it's a miracle that I laugh every day and walk through my life with pride, because our culture is unrelenting when it comes to large people.”

“So to me, fat just seems to be right to the point and the most descriptive way to say it.”

“The character I play is a wonderful compilation of things I hate about myself and things I love about myself and things that I've invented to make her even more interesting than me.”

“The way I see it, I can either cross the street, or I can keep waiting for another few years of green lights to go by.”

“Waiting, waiting, waiting. All my life, I've been waiting for my life to begin, as if somehow my life was ahead of me, and that someday I would arrive at it.”

“When I meet large women who walk with confidence and are articulate and really have an understanding of how they walk in this world, I love them so deeply for being able to overcome such unbelievable odds.”

“Years ago women of my size were considered royalty.”