When I was growing up, my parents would apologize when we didn't have enough money for something. I'd always tell them that it was O.K. and that I had learned to work hard because of them.

I just think it's crazy that we don't think that the youth are valid. They're the ones who really know what's going on.

My mother struggled immensely with mental illness, and so did I. She grew up bipolar, but it was never diagnosed nor recognized. It was shrugged off like a 'symptom' of being female - of her being weak. I also experienced this growing up: I felt that the great pain I experienced was a dramatisation.

I was depressed at a very young age - mental illness runs in my family, especially on the female side.

Music video directors, who conceive, write and direct these works, enjoy no creative rights, receive no ongoing financial benefit from the sale of our work, and many times are not even credited.

The winter solstice has always been special to me as a barren darkness that gives birth to a verdant future beyond imagination, a time of pain and withdrawal that produces something joyfully inconceivable, like a monarch butterfly masterfully extracting itself from the confines of its cocoon, bursting forth into unexpected glory.

I didn't have the equipment for the regular world of being a lawyer. I didn't have the imagination for that. I did have a funny kind of ambition, but I didn't know where to put it.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.