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.

In my fantasies, I always wanted to play the ingenue, but in reality, in my bones, I am so used to playing the grandmother that I don't feel safe or even sure that I can do it.

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.

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 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.

People in this country haven't stopped hating fat people, but they've become more kind to me, since in our culture, even though we hate our fat people, we love our celebrities even more.

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.

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.

When it comes to boys and her weight, I think Ellenor is much more conservative than I am, and she has not had the dialogue I have had about my weight.

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

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.

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.

I have lived my life in a culture that hates fat people.

Almost everything I do is related to being fat.

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.

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

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.

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