The universe will put signposts in your life. You can either ignore them or embrace them. You can choose and wish for all the things you want, but the things that are coming to you, you will never be able to hide from and the things that you want so bad that are not supposed to be for you for whatever reason, they'll never come to you.

If I die tomorrow, I've done the two hardest things anybody can do in this life with the least amount of security - music and acting - and I've had success in both. I can't really complain. I try not to live my life that way.

I acted when I was a real little kid. My mother was an actress in a Miami theater company comprised of actors from Cuba like her and I was the default kid.

It's funny, because I've never thought of myself as a Hispanic actor, like in 'American Gangster,' I'm playing an Italian. I've always been fortunate enough to have been allowed to play all these diverse roles.

No Child Left Behind taught us that parents, teachers and state and local leaders are more suited to address students' needs than a one-size-fits-all accountability system developed by Washington bureaucrats.

There is a gap in my work from '84 to 2002, 18 years where I stopped writing. I was working at fiction and other things and starting a school and getting married and starting a family, but I wasn't writing poetry for the better part of 15 years.

Everything a parent chooses to do in their life will forever haunt their kids.

A child comes to see his father play, have fun, make people happy, and what does he see? He sees people booing his father for being black. They make monkey noises. They throw bananas at his teammates and all that.