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"I wanted to be able to do everything, every kind of dance, which I've been very grateful that I studied all those various types of dancing. In the end of my life, when becoming a choreographer, it paid off for me."

"Whether it's comedy or drama, tell the truth. And whatever your truth is, tell it as boldly and as loudly as you can get away with."

"I love the adrenalin. I'm motivated by deadlines. And I love getting everything done when it needs to be done."

"In the early days of 'Monday Night Football' there was no competition from cable, none from satellite. Now when you put something on the air you know you're up against a thousand other pieces of entertainment that are out there ... It's an entirely different world. But if you put something on the air today and there's an attraction, people will find it, and they still find football in astonishing numbers."

"A joke is a joke, but I've noticed that the public is more sophisticated now. They don't seem to be hand-fed as they were in the early days. Now, we take the light approach as far as trying to drive home a joke with audience reaction. I think that it's okay to back off a little bit especially on a live-audience show. Go with the show and let them tell you."

"I'd get off from 'Jeffersons' and come right up 6th Street, zoom around the corner, and I'd be sitting at my desk at United Airlines.  'Good Evening, United Airlines, may I help you?' Sometimes people would say, 'your voice sounds familiar.'... Then I decided that if you only stretch one leg, you can't go very far, you've got to take both legs with you. I decided to give it a shot. And of course, I wasn't sorry."

"It's very important to me that on "Family Feud" I could kiss all people... I kissed black women daily and nightly on "Family Feud" for 11 years and the world didn't come to an end, did it?"

"I always say that if 'True Blood' were a presidential campaign, we would have a sign in the writer's room that said, 'It's the emotions, stupid.' You can come up with as many outlandish vampires, werewolves, and pyrotechnics as you can, but unless you care about these people then it's just going to be meaningless."

"There are a lot of things that I've done where I was the first black face to be out there and I was able to destroy the myth that a black person is incapable of doing this. That, to me, is a biggie. I made a lot of stage managers, and taught them, bridged them, so that they've gotten in."