I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I never had a lot of ideas. I always have exactly one that is the next project; the idea of a project beyond that project is ludicrous.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.

Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.

I don't enjoy hearing the sound of my voice. The most important things for me are impossible to articulate extemporaneously.

There are certain early plays of mine that I really don't like, but I can't imagine going back and fixing them. I would be totally incapable of it. I'm not in the head of the characters anymore.

If anything, I was the opposite of most college students who think they can do anything.

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

Don’t only wait until Christmas to love, love at all times.

Growing old is compulsory - growing up is optional.

The present moment is the still point around which the universe arises and subsides, only to be reborn again, fresh as a new born child.

Let there be dancing in the streets, drinking in the saloons, and necking in the parlor.

This was an era where I was going out every night seeing Sparks, Berlin, Duran Duran, and Split Enz. Amazing acts doing really weird stuff, and I was very open to music and letting it transform me.

I used to draw and illustrate, but I don't do that anymore because I just like to write. I like to leave the illustrations to actual professional illustrators.

The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

I've never felt fallow in the sense that there's been no work.

We need to be focused on defeating radical Islamic terrorists.

A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.