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I've learned to say, 'I'm a friend of Big Bird. He even taught me how to sound like him.'

Big Bird was the biggest star, I mean, children's favorite for a number of years. I have a 22-year-old granddaughter whose first words were 'Big Bird.'

Big Bird went through his very human kind of struggles as a child. No other children's character has been that complete and detailed.

I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

I know I don't own Big Bird, but I own his soul, I feel.

When he first started - Jim Henson, who created Bid Bird and Oscar - he said Big Bird was just a big, goofy guy. And it was - a script came along and I said, 'I think Big Bird would be much more useful to the show if he were a child learning all the things we were teaching in the show.' And so he didn't know the alphabet, even, for instance.

I've read hundreds of cookbooks. For my money, they are the bird.

I grew up with two different parakeets - one that lived for five years, and one that lived for 13 years - so I always had a bit of an attraction to birds and it's an oddly good fit to be in a movie about birdwatchers.

What I learned from my father is to think big.

The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense is his life, large-brained, large-lunged, hot, ecstatic, his frame charged with buoyancy and his heart with song.