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I have been a lifelong stutterer, and when I was young, I experienced some very difficult times.

I used to not stutter any. Oh, I did when I was a kid, I stuttered, I had a bad stutter until I was probably between the second and third grade and a guy got rid of it for me.

I couldn't speak well. I went to speech therapy for 10 years. And I was sort of frustrated in that sense.

The one thing I've learned is that stuttering in public is never as bad as I fear it will be.

I had a stutter 'till... I still do today. I just work on it a lot. I obsess, if you will, with it, but I stuttered throughout my childhood.

I had a bad stutter when I was really young. I couldn't get a sentence out. Like, 'D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-ad.' And that turned into a mumble.

Stuttering is painful. In Sunday school, I'd try to read my lessons, and the children behind me were falling on the floor with laughter.

I have an occasionally recurring stutter, but not when in character on stage in a play. Odd. James Earl Jones has the same pattern; he stutters in everyday life but not when acting. Preparation requires an actor's concentration to make the words belong to another person, which is its own sort of trance.

It has always seemed a cruel joke to me that the very word 'stutter' is difficult for many stutterers to pronounce. It is onomatopoeic, an imitation of the halting, repetitive sound made by people with this speech dysfunction.

I'm part of a speech therapy course called the Maguire Programme. It isn't a cure; it's something you need to maintain and work on. I get days where I find things more difficult than others.