“My first acting job happened by accident when I was really young.”

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.

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.

Acting means living, it’s all I do and all I’m good at. If I weren’t getting paid well, I would still be acting in a small troupe somewhere.

Acting is telling the truth under imaginary circumstances.

All I have to say is basically if performing, singing, acting, and dancing is what you want to do, then you just have to do it – no matter where it is.

Sometimes when you’re acting, you only need a little bit of something to sort of channel or, you know, transport into a place.

I would love to play Jimi Hendrix.

I’m an artist. Artists don’t need permission to work. Regardless of whether I’m acting or not, I write. I write when I’m tired in fact, because I believe your most pure thoughts surface.

I would love to have an ocean of love right now. That said, the number-one rule of acting is, ‘Do not seek approval from the audience.’ People don’t realize that. You can’t do stuff to get applause. You have to live in the truth.

The nature of the human mind is such that unless it is stimulated by images of things acting upon it from without, all remembrance of them passes easily away.