I've always been sort of entrepreneurial. ... I felt that I needed to learn how to write and produce so I could write my own thing and not worry about Hollywood finding me.
Hollywood wanted a certain type of comic - that Def Jam comedy style of comic that was very loud, very brash, very much from the ghetto, had that sensibility.
Science was the known and then people would place God in the unknown, like God explained the unknown.
There always seemed to be a place for God and, to me, it seemed like God was a place in the unknown side of the ledger.
I like to get things going. I get so many different ideas, whether it's film, TV, whatever.
When you work in television you're in the writer's room all the time. You can't take 10 days or a week to go watch movies. Nobody's going to sign up for that. But it's something I had always thought if I was every asked I would definitely do it if I had the time to do it.
It seems that there's a constant humbling - I don't know if that's the right word - because things are disproved all the time with new discoveries, at least that's the way it feels sometimes in the layman's world. Like, people will make proclamations of something to be true, and then 50 years later that's proven wrong because there's something else.
I grew up in California. I was outside of the city, not directly in it. So I did have an experience of the sky, but for me, it was the idea of space exploration that fueled my interest. I grew up in that age of the astronauts, and I was fascinated that we could leave the Earth.
You could be a music prodigy at age 4, like Mozart, but you can't be a writing prodigy.
I think it was Fran Lebowitz who said that there are no writing prodigies. You have to have something to write about.
I try to impart this when people say they want to be a writer and they want to go into show biz. I say, "Well, have you taken any courses? You can't just have a passion for it; you have to prepare yourself for a life of it."
There's a lot of magic in science, so to speak.
