I don’t think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don’t have that feeling. I don’t have that sort of control. I’m simply becoming.

One day you write nothing, the next you write eight pages. It’s not in your hands.

I was curious. Curiosity is a good thing. And I was curious about different people. And, as I said, I waited until something was strong enough to disturb me or inspire me to make a film.

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 could process a lot of information and make really fast decisions.

The thing that gives me peace of mind at night after a game, or after a season, is that I knew that I did everything that I could to get ready to play that game.

I prayed a lot about it. I sought a lot of advice from my dad.

Football has taught me not to be led by obstructions and setbacks but instead to be led by dreams.

That's a real challenge and a real issue. Reading the statistics, they had a ranking of quarterbacks, and the statistic was the percentage of a touchdown drive after an interception. To me, that is a telling statistic. The guys that have a high percentage are the guys that have short memories. They talk about having amnesia as a quarterback. You better move along from it. It is hard to say you forget about it, because you want to learn from it. You want to address it. You can't just say it never happened.

To be named Phi Beta Kappa, I was always real proud of that and still consider that one of my proudest achievements.