I've heard of nothing coming from nothing, but I've never heard of absolutely nothing coming from hard work.

I used to be a huge fan of 'Lockup' on MSNBC, and that certainly has helped with my understanding of the world.

I ran track in high school very competitively, and then ran it D-1 at Boston University. I ran there on an athletic scholarship and chose BU because they had both a good track program and an arts program.

When I was little, I didn't smile much. Don't get me wrong. I was a happy kid, but I couldn't stand the space, dead center, in between my teeth. Yeah, I could whistle through it, but so what? That didn't win me many points on the playground in Medfield, Massachusetts.

I wasn't happy at the career I was at and wanted to try something else, and so I tried fighting, and it's working out pretty well. I set my own schedule; I have my own training facilities. I'm not traveling as much, and I'm at home every night.

And I get asked all the time about my career, growing up as an athlete, as kind of an underdog type of player. I thought, what better to get your message out than to do a book?

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

In reality, throughout your career, you have to make yourself interesting enough for people to be waiting to see your films. In my case, people are longing to see what I come out with next. That's my success.