AP promoted me to the White House beat because I knew Clinton his family friends and staff better than anybody in the national press corps. Those contacts helped me break a few stories and get my career in Washington jump-started.

I am very lucky I have a very tight group of friends and a very supportive family and to this date no-one has ever sold a story on me.

I just want to be healthy and stay alive and keep my family going and everything and keep my friends going and try to do something so that this world will be peaceful. That is the most ambitious and the most difficult thing but I'm there trying to do it.

Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes. They want the role so badly that they agree to be exploited and then end up embarrassing family friends and even strangers.

Whenever I have friends over we end up eating and talking and losing track of time and once in a while singing karaoke. It reminds me of the family meals we had in Russia which always lasted a very long time. That's a tradition I miss.

I have had lots of friends who've been affected by Aids and a very good friend of mine Oscar Moore died of Aids and I was with him in his last year quite a bit. And of course he was a man living in a very rich culture with a wealthy family who was able to afford health care.

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'

My friends ask me why I still live with my family but I feel comfortable there. We've all been through so much together.

The last thing family and friends want is for you to spend money on them that you don't have or that you can't really spare.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.