When I started my company, many people said I shouldn't launch it as a retail concept because it was too big a risk. They told me to launch as a wholesaler to test the waters - because that was the traditional way.
I was doing an investigative article on arms trafficking that was taking me through Eastern Europe and the Middle East. And after I had interviewed a helicopter pilot who had been ferrying weapons into Liberia, I realized as I left the restaurant that I was being followed and set up for an ambush.
One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.
I just have a lot of respect for Terry and his family. He played without a mask, and his life was tragically ended. And it just means a lot to me to be up there with him and the other greats that have played that long.
I think the premise of somebody trying to recreate a night from their teenage years stuck with me as something potentially very tragically comic.
I was sure I'd set the world on fire, and it was hard for a young feller like me to realize the truth - that I hadn't set the world on fire, and I was totally unprepared to handle the consequences if 'The Big Trail' had been a success and launched me as a star.
What people don't always understand is that I established a certain lifestyle for my family back in the days of 'Species' and 'Mulholland Falls' and 'The Getaway.' I wasn't about to move my six kids into a trailer park. So when people offered me work, it wasn't always the best, but I had to buy groceries, and I had to put gas in the car.
Working in front of the camera keeps me alive. I couldn't care less about actors' trailers and food on sets and stuff like that - I just want to act.
I had a nervous breakdown at 17 when my first love left me, and he was a typical bad boy, albeit a charismatic one, with a string of broken hearts trailing behind him.
I started boxing for exercise, and on the very first day, the trainer got in the ring with me and said, 'Whoever controls the breathing in the ring controls the fight.' I immediately passed out.
My goal was always to be working on the biggest stage in the world: Hollywood. Even when I was doing 'The Bill,' I approached the work like it was a Hollywood classic such as 'Training Day' or 'Boyz n the Hood.' So to have worked with some of the greats I've admired, such as Forest Whitaker, Kathy Bates, Cuba Gooding Jr., etc., it warms me.
Even when I was training alone, just me and one of United's fitness coaches, I loved going onto the field, doing sprints, being at the training ground.
Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.
When Chelsea let me go, it was really deflating. For me, as a youngster, it's all I ever knew - living 10 minutes from the training ground, going to loads of the games.
What greatly annoys me is sometimes you see the short story being described as a training ground for the novel. Kind of like an apprenticeship. And in lots of ways, it's a far harder form.
I'm the youngest of four siblings and the baby of the family. My family just treated me like anyone else growing up. They taught me that everyone has a special and unique trait about them, and that mine is that I have a girl brain and a boy body.
I often get attacked in Saudi Arabia, but the critics don't ridicule my ideas. There were about 30 or 40 articles attacking me in the Saudi press. Not a single one debated something I wrote. They just ridiculed me as a person. They see me as a traitor who is writing in the foreign press. But discuss what I am writing? They will not.
It's less to do about me - 'Hey, I'm black and it hurts my feelings; it's a symbol of slavery and oppression' - and more to do with the fact that, as an American, I will not honor a group of treacherous traitors. That's why I despise the rebel flag.
When I'm acting, it's like I am the character - no one can talk to me. But I'm not so method I'd sell my house and live on the street to play a tramp.
I don't have any great first job tales: I've never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me.
