Well, to take me from where I was, and the life I was leading, to the life I lead now with the church and with the Lord and with Jesus Christ, it's a total, total turn-around.
When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work. My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged.
If you've done what you need to do, you need to go bury yourself, because what else are you going to do? I think that that's where life stops.
In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.
I think there's an anxiety in life where we automatically tend to look to the next thing or we're complaining about the past. Worrying is not going to make it happen or not happen.
Among the smaller duties of life I hardly know any one more important than that of not praising where praise is not due.
I've been in situations where, in the midst of really hardcore events in my life, I made some ridiculous off-color joke that was in horrible taste, but made people laugh.
Life is a canvas of many strokes where shades from different palettes meet into a picture so concrete that some forget it is their own, so become framed themselves.
You don't even really get used to doing scenes where you have to kiss, or be particularly intimate, with another person who's not actually your lover in real life.
My grandfather was a voodoo priest. A lot of my life dealt with spirituality. I can close my eyes and remember where I come from.
Hip-hop is the only music in the world where you can take any instrument and make it hip hop. It's anybody's music. It's what you make of it. That's for anything you do in life.
My music started as a way to break through weaknesses - like anxiety, which was completely taking over my whole life, where I could barely function.
We need to have an educational system that's able to embrace all sorts of minds, and where a student doesn't have to fit into a certain mold of learning.
It's interesting to do other people's music - that's how I learned to play, by learning other people's songs. It's nice to delve into how other people got to where they are.
Writing in a journal reminds you of your goals and of your learning in life. It offers a place where you can hold a deliberate, thoughtful conversation with yourself.
If this validates anything, it's that learning how to bunt and hit and run and turning two is more important than knowing where to find the little red light at the dug out camera.
Deficiency motivation doesn't work. It will lead to a life-long pursuit of try to fix me. Learn to appreciate what you have and where and who you are.
The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the '60s and '70s and '80s, that's what it was.
I'm like that person who hates going to magic shows - and I love magic, I love wizards - but going to a show where there is any possibility of audience participation is a nightmare for me.
Of course, I love tools. I also love arranging them, to the point where I came up with a name for my organizing metric: first-order retrievability.
Sunday's my day off, where I eat whatever I want. I don't not let myself have something. I do love French fries and bread.
