When I became an adult, I had absolutely nothing against drinking alcohol. Many of my friends drank. I would often make wine and offer it, but I never sat down and drank it myself. That affect my religious practice.

I think I got from my father and my mother a sense of morality, of the do's and don't's in society the notion that good people don't do this good people are responsible, good people participate in community, and good people vote, good people own land. These were things I heard from my father's pulpit.

My parents were not formally educated. Both were cognizant of the importance of education. The teachers and ministers were the role models, and they would say, you should want to be like Miss Gardiner, you should want to be like Mr. Freeman, or be like your dad. Shun the people who don't value education.

We were told, no, you don't do. There was this high standard of morals and a sense of responsibility. That didn't mean that everybody stuck to those laws, but we were cognizant of the importance of trying to live up to that code.

I established relationships with so many of those Iran students that went on for years.And they were so different from American students. They seemed to worship their teachers. The professors were major to them. They wanted to give gifts, and you'd have to say, oh, no, no, you can't do that.

There was no real gender definition in the sense of how you treat people in those days with gender differences. You avoided them. My parents always told me that you do not make fun of anybody, and so I didn't see anything funny about it.

James Porter said to me once, when I was talking about painting, he said, well, that's fine, he said, but you have a good mind so you can't just be a painter you're going to have to help define the field and keep the tradition going. And he meant walking in his footsteps in a certain way.

I always said, you have to have a goal and an objective in life.