You're working on being a father so that is something that when you experience it you'll understand the profundity of wanting to protect something dear to you.

You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time you want to be truthful to the predecessors because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.

Your own experience keeps taking you towards something. My book adds the hope that it's a better something.

When something is new to us we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

You know I've learned a lot from every person I've collaborated with from Madlib to Jean Grae and Hi-Tek to Mos to DJ Quik to even somebody like Jermaine Dupri. I've taken something important away from every experience.

My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

People only talk about what a joyous experience it is but there is terror: Your life as you know it is over. It's over the day that child is born. It's over and something completely new starts.

I think most artists will experience a lot of negative people on Twitter but thank God I've got so many followers that I'm not able to see them that much. I'll see some from time to time but for the most part I always focus on something good.

I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.