If we each get on a treadmill right now, one of two things is going to happen... either you're going to get off first or I am going to die. Period.

I want to represent the idea that you really can make what you want I believe I can create whatever I want to create.

There's a forgiveness that literary audiences will give you that film audiences don't give you. It's the two hour construct. You're in there and it needs to climax and finish.

When I say I am going to run three miles, I run five. With that mentality, it is actually difficult to lose.

I so connected to symbolically being able to turn lead into gold. My grandmother used to say, "Life give you a lemon, you go ahead and make lemonade." To me, that's alchemy.

I grew up in the church, Resurrection Baptist Church in Philadelphia, and my grandmother was that grandmother at the church, the one always at the church, always putting on the events. It was deeply instilled in me that every action, everything I create, everything I say and do in the world is inexorably bound to the lives of everybody I come in contact with - and it's my responsibility to put things into the world that have a positive influence on humanity.

For me and my storytelling and the way that I embrace stories in the way that I embrace characters, I desperately needed to know that everything was okay.