I'd been shy since childhood, constantly full of self-doubt. And as an actor, I'd been so scared of failing that I made my career - and myself - a big joke.
I've always been naughty but shy since my childhood, and comparatively Raima's always been an extrovert.
Believing in myself has always been hard. For a long time, I constantly compared myself to others, and it took away from the energy I could have been putting into my career.
I have been a cry baby since my childhood. Even teachers were scared of my crying.
No I don't get scared when returning kicks or worry about getting hurt. I have been doing this since childhood so I am used to it.
I've called myself an actor - I won't say I've been an actor, but I've called myself an actor - since 1989. That's when I moved to Los Angeles.
I've kept the people who've been in my career who I feel are my family. Kathy [Kennedy] had been with me since 1978. Janusz Kaminsky, my cinematographer, has made every movie with me since Schindler's List. Michael Kahn has cut every movie I've directed since 1976 when we made Close Encounters together. Rick Carter has done more than 15 of my directed films as a production designer.
I think as an actor, you're constantly putting yourself out there, and a lot of times failing - and failing in front of a bunch of people - and sometimes you have a good moment and something clicks.
I have been recording every single one of my shows since 1994. Every single joke I've ever done is on a hard drive. I can tell you when I wrote every joke I wrote. I can tell you the first time I said it, when I made it different, when I made it better.
Since my childhood, I have been watching Telugu films. It was always my dream to make it big here.
I think I've been on a path ever since I was born, a path of high stress. I put myself, my career, it was a big old juicy carrot right in front of me for all of my life.
For me, in my auditioning career and my professional life, since I am kind of a big person and since I have a big personality, I often find myself trying to squeeze myself into boxes that are really too small for me, and it ends up not working out.
Disney has been such a big part of my early career. I've done two pilots for Disney, and I've been working with them since I was 16, and I just turned 21.
Had my dad not been short and fat and balding, there's no doubt his career would have been very different. But he could do lots of stuff and made a very good career out of it. He had an incredible work ethic because he lost his father when he was very young, and the family had to pull together.
The only pressure comes form myself. I put pressure on myself at first just because I was intimidated. When I made Amy Poehler laugh, it was a big thing for me. She's been one of my role models since high school, because she started UCB, which is what I wanted to do since high school.
We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.
Since childhood, I've been a clown. I've always liked being very funny or trying to make people laugh. It's my original self.