I know it affected me when I saw certain actors growing up. I had a drama teacher that would take us to see plays in New York, and it was seeing James Earl Jones and Raul Julia - I mean, this guy comes from the place my mother comes from. He's doing Shakespeare right now, and it doesn't seem to matter that he has an accent.

Growing up in New York, we lived all around the city depending on our economic circumstance. I also lived in Puerto Rico for a number of years.

When I sit down and sign up for something, I vet where the people are coming from.

California has been very good to me in terms of the professional arena.

Being a creative person, I'm naturally drawn towards art of any kind. But I'm more attracted to paintings because they radiate an aura of their own.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

We have plenty of technologies we could use to destroy the planet, and we don't. There's more love on this planet than hate; there's more creativity than destructive power.

To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.