I remember after 9/11, I started - I was working quite a bit in Vancouver. And then I realized I would go to catch my flight, and it would take me like 20 minutes to get cleared to fly, like, every time. I'm like, what is going on?

So many Muslims would tell you that they felt like that you had to - you fold it into yourself because people were looking at you and recognizing you as being the culprit even though, look, I'm American. I don't believe that the teachings of Islam justified those actions.

I always hope to be a better person tomorrow than today.

My experiences growing up - my father lived in New York, so I was going out there in the summers and meeting really interesting people and people having what seemed to me to be extraordinary experiences and really taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities. And so I will go - I would go to the big city and watch these people performing onstage and doing television and films. And then I would go back to Hayward, and it just suddenly felt that much smaller and sort of limiting because I had this hyper awareness of how much larger the world was.

I was always sort of ahead of myself in some way, shape or form and trying to envision how to get further along and closer to fulfilling that dream of being of being free and having a creative agency, so to speak.

At the end of the day we're all spirits having a physical experience.

What inspires me today is a desire to get closer to an understanding of what my artistic capacities are with the hope of organically sharing my gifts with an audience in the most heightened way I possibly can.