I can't say I was much of a gamer growing up or that I am now, but I'm certainly part of that culture or it's part of, you know, the sort of time that I grew up in.

But as an actor you do want to challenge yourself and step outside what you have done in the past and that what I like to do, I like to jump around and try different things and stretch myself.

I can remember when 'Pulp Fiction' came out. I was, like, 10 years old. But I remember the impact that it had.

My first paying job was guest starring in 'Touched By An Angel' when I was 12. It was very exciting. I couldn't believe you got free food all day and people were so nice to you.

Chess masters don't evaluate all the possible moves. They know how to discard 98 percent of the ones they could make and then focus on the best choice of the remaining lot. That's the way expertise works in other fields, too: Wise practitioners recognize familiar patterns and put their creativity, improvisation, and skill toward the marginal cases.

One way we can enliven the imagination is to push it toward the illogical. We're not scientists. We don't always have to make the logical, reasonable leap.

A lot of creativity coming from the east side of Harlem. It really built my character and who I am.

My cure for writer's block is to step away from the thing I'm stuck on, usually a novel, and write something totally different. Besides fiction, I write poetry, screenplays, essays and journalism. It's usually not the writing itself that I'm stuck on, but thing I'm trying to write. So I often have four or five things going at once.