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.

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.

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.

That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you'll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Our lives say much more about how we think than our books do. The theories we preach are not always the ones we actually believe. The theories we live are the ones we really believe.

The problem was just a mean attitude that festers and has to be challenged.

The process of acting is no different [playing human or ape]. You're embodying the character. You're creating the psychology and the physicality. You're living the moment.

There's somebody else just like you trying to do it! But you gotta do it faster than they do it!

A blaspheming Frenchman is a spectacle more pleasing to the Lord than a praying Englishman.

I mean, I'm an actor. I do what comes along.

The saddest thing of word or pen, To know the things that might have been.

Good parents give their children Roots and Wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what's been taught them.

I try to separate my personal life from swimming.