I love short stories because I believe they are the way we live. They are what our friends tell us, in their pain and joy, their passion and rage, their yearning and their cry against injustice.

I think the deeper you go into questions, the deeper or more interesting the questions get. And I think that's the job of art.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

I see a lot of marriages crash and burn around me and my wife. I've always been curious about how hard it is to love well and be loved.

Fear is a ghost; embrace your fear, and all you’ll see in your arms is yourself.

As a matter of writing philosophy, if there is one, I try not to ever plot a story. I try to write it from the character's point of view and see where it goes.

I've learned over the years that the writing is smarter and far larger than the writer and his or her own desires for it.

I have always known that writing fiction had little effect on the world; that if it did, young men would not have gone to war after The Iliad.

Somewhere, sometime I'd stopped expecting my father to father.

I read poetry every day. I love the boiled down essence of poetry. I look for poetry in prose. In a way that evocative.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Life is a perpetual yesterday for us.

The term 'serious actor' is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Like 'Republican party' or 'airplane food.'

Ive always been a religious person.

Someday, somehow, I am going to do something useful, something for people. They are, most of them, so helpless, so hurt and so unhappy.

There is a level of snobbery and fickleness in L.A.

[History is] the very servant of the servants of God, the drudge of all the drudges.

In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race.

But happiness is being able to hope, however faintly, for happiness. So, at least, we must believe if we are to live in the world of today.

A hero is someone who simply got too frightened to use his good sense and run away, then somehow lived through it all.

This is something I love to do. I've never had any other job. I love singing and entertaining.