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

I applied to American Repertory School up at Harvard at got in.

It is important to make your own stuff. Even if you are not an actor, it is important to not stop involving yourself as a creative person.

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.

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.

Early on in my life I comprehended that death is the most tragic event in our life.

The development of quantum mechanics early in the twentieth century obliged physicists to change radically the concepts they used to describe the world.

The difference between the actor and the painter is that the actor would buy somebody a knish in order to have them watch him act.

Failure’s relative. I’ve always felt, even early on, if I lose the freedom to fail, something’s not right about that. It’s how you treat failure, too.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.

My early career was a real rush of movies and stardom – it was almost overwhelming.

It’s never really that much fun for me to do movies anyway, because you – you know, you have to get up very early in the morning and you have to go in and you spend a lot of time waiting around.

If you can intervene early in the lives of girls here and in other parts of the world, you can begin to change the prospects for the future.