“Having a life in transit, I feel like you are always looking out the back window.”

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.

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

The camera is interested in what you are thinking as opposed to just what you are doing or saying.

Actors are physical, olympian storytellers and we should be able to create entire landscapes with nothing.

Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp.

It is important to keep your head up and follow what you believe is right.

I remember being about six years old, for the first day of school, and sitting in the back of a Chrysler, pretending to cry while listening to Tracy Chapman.

When you come back you will not be you. And I may not be I.

I look forward and see myself look back.

Looking back, I now see so many similarities between my own childhood and that of my sons. My father stepped in when I needed him, and that gave me the chance for a better life. That’s what I’m doing for my boys now.

For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law.

I don’t get tired. I get beat up. You keep chopping on a tree, you need to give the tree some rest so the chlorophyll will fill back up and the tree gets its energy back.

When I went off to college in 1997, I didn’t go back and watch ‘Conan.’ I was out partying and dating women.

Jealousy is invariably a symptom. Just like right now with the whole mortgage crisis, I want to help people get back into their homes.