What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

I've never written a movie I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on and that feels like enough of a job for me.

I'm a filmmaker and I'm proud of the movies I've made. But in the background of my life I was also very involved in the creation of the sport.

Success is not something I've wrapped my brain around. If people go to those movies then yes that's true big-time success. If not it's much ado about nothing.

All that running around in my underwear put money in my pockets. I can focus on working in interesting movies without having to worry about supporting myself.

Everybody gets typecast in movies but you have to make wise choices. I'd say around 90 percent of movie casting is about the way you look so you have to fight that. If producers had their way I'd only be in action films but I'm interested in a more varied career than that.

Skinniness is not your friend when you're over 40. I'd like to gain a good 10 pounds but I did always have a fat round face that plagued me when I was young. When I started to make movies I couldn't look at myself.

I was going to make movies. I was the one in the family who was always rolling the video camera making movies of my brothers around town and then screening them for my parents. I still would love to make movies someday... that's something that really means a lot to me and I know I'll have the chance to do it one day.

For a number of years I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be which is stupid.

I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal Richard Roundtree Jim Brown Pam Grier. For the first time I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'