I mean I love L.A. - I love living here. But I wish that we could make things without the need to hit a home run every single time. It's a unique thing to Hollywood that if you don't do that every time then you're considered a failure. But it's like 'Well are you making movies to be successful? Or are you making movies to learn something?'

The young think that failure is the Siberian end of the line banishment from all the living and tend to do what I then did - which was to hide.

I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who's kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.

I would vote for the man who's lived life who's done different occupations who's been out in the real world and struggled to make a living struggled to raise a family struggled with life as it exists. So I'd vote for experience honest experience.

I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.

There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

It's been quite an experience being conservative and living in the North East.

I'd like to work with Justin Bieber. He's talented and he's so young. I know what he's going through. I've lived what he's living through right now. Working with him would complete a circle of sorts for me. And he might find it a worthwhile experience himself.