I'm a filmmaker who decided to go to culinary school. All I picked up was the fact if I didn't understand what was going on with every single ingredient I could be qualifying for like the lunch food job at my daughter's school.

The way you deal with a scare is the way you deal with a laugh. The timing has to be perfect. When you're dealing with fear or laughter - emotions that happen spontaneously - you hope it's working. But in the moment you really have no idea.

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio the telephone Facebook - each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

They did interviews with my wife and daughter-they were genuinely in fear of me having a heart attack working 20 hours a day eating fast food.

Somehow we can't live outside the politics of race. There's something very deep in all of us that is taught to us when we are very very little. Which is the disrespect and fear of the other.

You always fear when you're making a movie that has a moral to the story that people are going to reject the idea of being taught a lesson.

Comedy is defiance. It's a snort of contempt in the face of fear and anxiety. And it's the laughter that allows hope to creep back on the inhale.

Religion. A daughter of Hope and Fear explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable.

I write for those women who do not speak for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We've been taught that silence would save us but it won't.

I was set free because my greatest fear had been realized and I still had a daughter who I adored and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.