I am forever grateful for 'Cheers.'

You should always carry string, according to my archaeologist father, because then you could at least make a trap to catch animals to survive. According to my grandmother, it was clean underwear.

I was at our beautiful home in Martha's Vineyard, near Boston, sitting on the porch looking at the ocean when I got a phone called and was asked, 'Would I like to do 'CSI'?' A week later, I'm at a coroner's office in Las Vegas, participating in a quadruple autopsy.

Humor can bring people under the tent. And a good joke can deflect some of the intensity surrounding a serious subject.

When you have brothers, you learn to be fiercely competitive with someone you love so they won't kill you and you won't kill them.

Years ago, we all talked about recycling and not dumping things down your drain and all of that, but talking doesn't help much. Basically, it's going to have to be legislation because the impact is so huge and diversified.

My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life.

I first saw the ocean as a kid. We would drive from Arizona in the summer and arrive as the sun was starting to come down over the hill near Laguna in southern California. We would always sing a song, and it was a big joyous family moment when we came over the hill.

The planet will survive. Whether we get to be here and enjoy it, or enjoy life as we've known it, is what's questionable.

I got my first television at Stanford when I was 20, and I used to watch 'The Dick Van Dyke Show'. He played my father on 'Becker,' and he's still one of my heroes. Along with John Cleese, he's my favourite physical comedian.

My joints hurt. I'm slower. But I remember what it was like to run and play with the boys. I want to be one of the boys.

The industrial way we fish for seafood is harming the marine habitats that all ocean life depends upon. Indiscriminate commercial fishing practices that include miles of driftnets, long lines with thousands of lethal hooks and bottom trawls are ruining ocean ecosystems by killing non-seafood species, including sea turtles and marine mammals.

I'm an actor, so I am always scared. You never know if you are on vacation or that you have been retired and they just didn't tell you.

I was three. My father in jest said that he'd tell the doctor to give me a shot if I didn't behave. Good heavens, I have a mental picture of the living room and the doctor approaching the door. I was terrified.

We're not trying to reinvent the wheel; for any environmental organization to claim sole responsibility for any kind of victory is insane, because everybody attacks these problems as a group.

Most of us can now record a whole series with the click of a button. We all have DVD players, and the rise of the DVD box-set means we watch this stuff in two, three-hour sessions. So there is this real appetite out there for lengthy, pretty intricate drama. All that is great news for writers.

You use and lose a lot of energy being grumpy.

We have a project with Unocal here in Los Angeles, where we as an environmental organization, the oil company, and the state all get together to promote the recycling of used motor oil.

I feel very strongly that you can't just beat people up anymore; you have to work hand in hand and find ways to compromise, and get big business involved, because it won't happen otherwise.

I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation.

When people are in the midst of really heavy stuff and still have a sense of humor, I admire that.

One of the hardest things for me to do is watch myself. The first time I see it, I am obsessed with my left ear or my right ear or some other physical attribute, or the fact that I'm 60 or whatever shallow ego thought is running through my head. I'm just destroyed that I'm not Cary Grant or whatever.

My most annoying habit is complaining about my aches and pains. It's the new ones that I haven't identified yet that make me nervous. According to my wife, I complain way too much. I may be a borderline hypochondriac, or you could say I am fascinated by the body - at least by mine.

One of the ingredients that made Cheers work so well was the great ensemble of actors we had. That's the case with any good series.

My temperament is not the adventuresome sort that enjoys starting new projects every six months. I love ensemble, nine-to-five stability. There's a family dynamic in making a television show that you don't get on a movie, where you're a hired gun for a few months.

I'm basically a know-it-all, and I'm writing a book about it. I want it to be called 'Danson on Water' and have me on the cover in this Christlike pose, standing on the water.

Usually if you're the center of a show, part of your job is to host its energy.

I don't think I'm as educated as Whoopi, so I'm lifting myself to her level. But you know, our view of the world, our view of what we can do, our sense of what it means to be here, are similar.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

If you take one rivet out of an airplane, it will be all right, it'll keep flying. You take another rivet out of the airplane and it still flies. So what the heck, let's take more rivets out of the airplane, and sooner or later, the airplane drops from the sky.

I'm almost tempted, when I'm playing a real person, not to meet them. Afterwards, maybe. But, the job is the same. You still have to show up on screen and be alive and real and all that stuff.