You have to have some kind of power of observation, almost like a trained observer.

But the throat just kind of falls into line once you realize in your head what it is. You got to remember the musicality of a character you're going to do.

I'm not like a high intellectual.

To observe is not to not feel—in fact, it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child's warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. 'I have two homes,' my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, 'and I have no home.' To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?

I was toilet trained at gunpoint

I've always said that you can't be the new Mel Blanc by doing Mel Blanc's voice.