It takes a combination of ways to do these things, more than discipline. It’s a way of life. It’s like diet or gymnastics. You can know all the gymnastic things, all the exercises. You can know all the diets, but if you don’t do the diets, if you don’t do the exercise, it won’t work. It’s the same if you have some rules, but you don’t live them. It doesn’t work.

It's just, I would say, faith. I had very clear visions of me being a champion. When I saw this picture of Reg Park on a cover, standing there like - as Hercules, from the Hercules movies, I looked at that, and then I looked at the inside and I read the story, and I immediately started creating visions of me standing there on the pedestal at the Mr. Universe contest and me being Hercules and me doing movies and so on. And that created such unbelievable drive and such unbelievable will and discipline, that there was absolutely no stopping me. I mean, I went to the gym two hours every day lifting weights. When I came home afterwards, I lifted an extra hour and a half and did bodybuilding training, and it was just relentless.

No, never. Strangely enough, being such a tomboy, and being so—as my mother says—spoiled as a child, once I started dancing and in a way growing up, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was when I really had no reason to be as a child. When you work, it’s a laboratory. The dance studio, when we were working together, was the place where you experiment. I’m not intimidated by failure or making a mistake, because you learn from those situations. You don’t learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don’t really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. When you fail, maybe you failed in that particular instance, but you have discovered something else. A lot of the ballets that we went on to do were built around mistakes that we had made in the classroom. So you never throw anything out. Rebelling takes up energy. As a dancer, you don’t have that kind of energy to throw away.

I agree with him, essentially, 100 percent. One has to devote oneself to a particular pursuit. To be successful at anything, you have to make a total commitment to it. We so often see students who would love to play baseball like one of their heroes, or would love to be on the basketball court or the football field. They don’t see the 99 percent effort that went into practicing making baskets, or practicing hitting the baseball, or practicing catching a pass on the football field. It takes a tremendous amount of perspiration, a tremendous amount of hard work that you don’t always see or appreciate in the end result. You will find this over and over. Most achievers I know are people who have made a strong and deep dedication to pursuing a particular goal. That dedication took a tremendous amount of effort. That is certainly true in my case. It took a tremendous amount of work to get from point A to point B.

But it was quite intense to be the first Black person that my German friends had seen. Actually laid eyes, and hands, on. And there was the German language, which I had to learn, and the German kids learned British English, so my American English was frowned upon. … Maybe I write like I do because I spent those years in the cauldron of not fluently speaking the native language of my classmates. Those several years of being told that the tongue I spoke wasn’t right.

Right. And let’s put Michelangelo in quotes, ’cause was he really the one who actually said that? But, anyway, the idea still holds. I feel that whatever I’m writing exists already. Maybe that’s because of a glitch in the space-time continuum and when I write I’m actually putting my living self behind the present moment in time. Like I’m following something through the woods. Eyes open. Ears open. Heart open. And I’m following a path that is sometimes behind me.