It's the attitude about life, man. Looking at the light instead of the dark. Looking at love instead of fear.

We got into all the trouble you could ever imagine. We figured that if the Jones boys and all the gangsters ran Chicago, we had our own territory now. All the stores, all the crime, we were in charge of everything, my stepbrother and my brother.

Music in movies is all about dissonance and consonance, tension and release.

All the jazz guys had interracial relationships, and even the ladies did. Over the years, interracial relationships have been a hip, almost defiant thing, a way of saying "Nobody can put a boundary around me."

Editing while you're writing is like strangling the baby in the crib.

My brother died of cancer two years ago (1998), renal cell carcinoma. He was my only real brother and I didn't know what to do. I'd never been so desperate in my life.

My earliest memories are being pinned to a fence with a switchblade.