“I think that rap is narrative, when it’s done right.”

We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects.

Part of the work is determining through what instrument you are playing.

I love films for the fact that it is like working under a microscope. It is sort of like a laboratory.

I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

I had been working early in my life in films – since I was 11.

In every character I play, I try to imbibe something. Every film is a learning process for me.

I was in fifth grade and my teacher saw an ad in the paper and took me to the audition after school and I got the part.

It is important to tell good stories. You can tell stories even if they are not huge, epic, and wonderful.

There is extraordinary similarities between the Midwest in America and Europe in that there is this sense of vast, open sky and loneliness and cold.

I want to present interesting stories that don’t qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.

America makes up its own mind about what it wants to see.

I hear music as narrative.

Rap is rhythm and poetry. Hip-hop is storytelling and poetry as well.

It paid my way through college and helped my family out.

You can still take the responsibility for being a scribe of your tribe.

I think that I have sold out sometimes.

Thank God for Canada! In the context of this narrative [in Underground] and beyond.

The structure of my novels has nothing to do with the narrative mode of cinema. My novels would be very difficult to film without ruining them completely.

In narrative films, you set up reality, so you can limit the variables.

The urge to create a fictional narrative is a mysterious one, and when an idea comes, the writer’s sense of what a story wants to be is only vaguely visible through the penumbra of inspiration.

What would a narrative of happiness be like? All that can be described is what prepares it, and then what destroys it.

Change the narrative. It will change your mindset.  

A new pain is an old pain wrapped in a new narrative.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.