The director's job should give you a sense of music without drawing attention to itself.

I try to get the best performance an actor can give.

Look at Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster: It's an incredible performance.

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.

My dad loved music, and he passed that on to me. I fell in love with hip-hop the first time I heard it. I started writing raps at a young age. I wasn't a Christian at that point. I thought I was, but I don't think I was, looking back on it.

I try to write short novels and leave details out not because I want to be minimalist, but because I think that it enables the readers' creativity and interaction with the book.

Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.

When I do music, I have a hard time experiencing it like everyone else, because there's so much thought that goes into it. You can sometimes fool yourself into thinking it's better than what it is, which stops me from being creative on the next thing I do.