The 'Jonny Quest' theme had a huge influence on me while I was growing up.

When I was growing up, every show had live music. Now, almost none have live music. Probably 97 percent of the shows on television are probably synthesized, or mostly synthesized, and that's a shame.

When I was 10, I had a group of friends that I used to love to make movies with, and we made them growing up; we did it all through high school.

I always feel like my writing is consistently influenced by everything I watched and listened to growing up, so it's just this crazy collage of everything, you know.

I hope that I'm sexy in a different kind of way than I think that a lot of girls are right now. I think a lot of girls in the public eye, especially musical artists, are just kind of objectified a little bit and wearing super-skimpy outfits and leaving nothing to the imagination.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

The only way I see the world now is through coming out of and growing up and living in Somalia. In the time of war, everyone was basically trying to live and manage the best they could. But you also had another period which was not a hard time at all - it was just a beautiful time. I lived in both eras.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.