My dad, in particular, was adamant that I should finish my education. He encouraged me to go to Oxford, for instance, and I rather doubt I'd have gone if he hadn't. I would have gone straight back to L.A. and tried to start my career.

American culture is very good at interpersonal relationships and people skills, whereas we're incredibly adept at academics and straightforward 19th-century Victorian education.

I support equal rights and equal dignity for all.

Everyone's parents were famous actors at my school, pretty much! I think I went to school with Paris Hilton when I was three. That's what L.A. is, though - it's an industry town. You go to school with kids and you think, 'Well that's normal, they make movies.'

The creative brand of Cirque du Soleil is creativity.

The main functions of intelligence, that of inventing solutions and that of verifying them, do not necessarily involve one another. The first partakes of imagination; the second alone is properly logical.

Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.

Fear of error which everything recalls to me at every moment of the flight of my ideas, this mania for control, makes men prefer reason's imagination to the imagination of the senses. And yet it is always the imagination alone which is at work.