I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.

It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don't get in trouble.

My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.

In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.

That's what I like about [smoking] . . . taking a drag off of death, Mmm! Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What power! What exhilaration! Want a drag?

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

I find it fascinating to think about what the world is going to be like when people won't talk anymore.

The first problem of war was that no one was any good at it yet.

There are three keys for your journey. Humility, wisdom, love. Don’t leave without them - they will enrich you all the way. And they will bless those around you.

Most of our problems today are not that we don’t know, but that we don’t know how to put things together with the right zeal and grit to get something noble and leave noble footprints!

i'm going to bed before either of you come up with another clever idea to get us killed or worse expelled

I'm a very methodical writer. Before computers, I used reams of paper and stacks of index cards.

A man can never be idle with safety and advantage until he has been so trained by work that he makes his freedom from times and tasks more fruitful than his toil has been.

The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose.

I feel like someone after a deluge being asked to describe the way it was before the flood while I'm still plucking seaweed out of my hair.

As I get older, it's a time to enjoy life.

Likewise, free trade does not, as evidenced in CAFTA, mean fair trade.