It always seems impossible until it's done.

Sports have the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else does.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

Forget the past.

I grew up in an era of thinking of travel as escape. The idea that you could conceivably have a new life, go somewhere, fall in love, have little children under the palm trees.

I was a quiet, nerdy kid living in the Bronx. I spent most of my teens in my room, taking apart electrical items to figure out how they worked before putting them back together, and listening to the music my four older sisters and parents played.

If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.

I was 17 and living on the streets. I had the education of technically an eighth-grader, but in reality, I had never had a formal education.