Within loyalism and the UVF, there are clearly people who are not just aggravated by the issue around flags or parades. They're aggravated by me and Sinn Fein being in government. They're opposed to the political institutions - there's an inability of a minority within loyalism to accept the concept of equality.
It's aggravating to me when you meet people that are just... you know, there's a difference between wanting to be an actor or a writer or something creative, and just wanting to be seen.
It seems to me that's the only way you can have a truly creative aggregate of people is if they're all contributing in different ways.
My mom's a psychologist, and I think that has influenced me on a personal level. Plus, I'm just generally interested in visualization and humanity, social activity and technology, and what happens in aggregate.
I watch movies all the time, so it's hard to pick certain specific directors that have inspired me in the aggregate.
Football changed my life and it gave me a platform to get out my aggression and it gave me a sense of value.
Sometimes you need conflict in order to come up with a solution. Through weakness, oftentimes, you can't make the right sort of settlement, so I'm aggressive, but I also get things done, and in the end, everybody likes me.
As a child, the family that I had and the love I had from my two parents allowed me to go ahead and be more aggressive, to search and to take risks knowing that, if I failed, I could always come home to a family of love and support.
I don't get described as necessarily being aggressive. I don't know if 'laid-back' is the word. I think, if anything, what I would want people to say about me is, 'I think he had guts.'
If you look at me in 'Ride Along,' even though I'm playing two different characters, my demeanor and my tone were not aggressive.
Things that I now recognise as just part of my personality - willfulness and assertiveness, maybe even a bit of aggressiveness - these are things that I had been raised to think of as masculine features. I always thought there was probably something wrong with me.
The aggressiveness of it attracted me to hip-hop because I was angry inside. I was an angry kid because of the sickle cell. So I liked the anger in hip-hop. That's what attracted me to it; that's what made me want to do it. It helped me get my aggression out.
It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed.
I was never a big guy in pubs. I was never the main kind of aggressor or anything like that, but I found myself in trouble because I always had a mouth that would come back with something, and there was just never anyone who could make me be quiet.
I'm a pretty agile guy, especially being taller and having done martial arts from about the age of 13, but parkour is one of those sports that I wish I'd discovered sooner. When my nephew first showed me, I thought, 'Damn - I'm too old for this.'
I prefer to fight a bigger guy. I don't like fighting smaller guys; they give me problems with their agility.
For me, from day one, I don't think I realized that I was considered undersized, but I knew I was good. I had certain tools in my toolbox that other guys didn't have, like agility, quickness and explosiveness.
With wrestling, we're still athletes. I train like we're an athlete as opposed to a body builder. Some people still have that body-builder mentality. But not from me. I do a lot of agility work and stuff like that.
In Henry Adams, I discovered not only the prototype of the modern thinker but also someone who is more interesting: a viper-toothed, puling, supercilious crank, thwarted in ambition, aging gracelessly, mad at the cosmos, and ashamed of his own jejune ideals. He is nevertheless very dear to me.
The bulk of my fans are my age, and I'm aging at the same rate they are. That makes me relevant. They like hearing what I have to say. I work hard at it, but it's addicting, really.
