I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me.

I would love to continue in music with writing... but I am not the kind of person who will hang around if I start to become irrelevant. If that happens I will bow down gracefully raise my kids and have a garden. And I am going to let my hair go gray when I am older. I don't need to be blonde when I'm 60!

I came into music just because I wanted the bread. It's true. I looked around and this seemed like the only way I was going to get the kind of bread I wanted.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas.

The reflection of the world is blues that's where that part of the music is at. Then you got this other kind of music that's tryin' to come around.

Dre was one of my heros in the music industry. If he's not down for his homeboys I don't wanna be a part of him or around him.

If it were the Clinton people they'd be sitting around figuring out how to pull themselves out. Instead the president is continuing to go around the country and peddling Social Security which the needle is not moving on.

Like anyone who goes to college you're leaving a familiar surrounding and a comfortable environment and your friends and everything and you're starting fresh. It can be pretty daunting.

What surrounds us we endure better for giving it a name - and moving on.

I've never written a movie I'm not in the movie business. I go out to L.A. and I'm like everyone else wandering around in a daze hoping I see movie stars. I write the novels that the movies are based on and that feels like enough of a job for me.

I'm a filmmaker and I'm proud of the movies I've made. But in the background of my life I was also very involved in the creation of the sport.

Success is not something I've wrapped my brain around. If people go to those movies then yes that's true big-time success. If not it's much ado about nothing.

All that running around in my underwear put money in my pockets. I can focus on working in interesting movies without having to worry about supporting myself.

Everybody gets typecast in movies but you have to make wise choices. I'd say around 90 percent of movie casting is about the way you look so you have to fight that. If producers had their way I'd only be in action films but I'm interested in a more varied career than that.

Skinniness is not your friend when you're over 40. I'd like to gain a good 10 pounds but I did always have a fat round face that plagued me when I was young. When I started to make movies I couldn't look at myself.

I was going to make movies. I was the one in the family who was always rolling the video camera making movies of my brothers around town and then screening them for my parents. I still would love to make movies someday... that's something that really means a lot to me and I know I'll have the chance to do it one day.

For a number of years I'd been around the kind of people who financed movies and the kind of people who are there to make the deals for movies. But I'd always had this naive idea that everybody wants to make movies as good as they can be which is stupid.

I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal Richard Roundtree Jim Brown Pam Grier. For the first time I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'

I want to be around for a long time singing and making albums and movies.

Each one of my movies becomes easier to get off the ground.

For me relationships are the real action movies. Bombs are exploding every day and the kitchen is Ground Zero.

Usually when you see females in movies they feel like they have these metallic structures around them they are caged in by male energy.

I've been on so many movies. Generally I haven't gotten to be on the ground level. As of two years ago in 'Dear John ' I got to really be on the ground floor. I wasn't a producer. I felt like I put the work in and I did have a lot of sway on what got fixed reshoots so on and so forth. It felt really good.

Before I'd written movies I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers - when you've got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people's ability to do that.