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"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."

"I've had people in the ensuing years say to me, 'if they did 'Gilligan's Island' today you'd all be living in the same tent.' It's true. That innocence was kept and it worked."

"I wish somehow there could be a billboard that says to these young actors: 'strive to be great.' Even if you're not required by the script. Strive to find something that expands you."