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.

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.

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.

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.

With the many uncertainties, of one thing I was sure. I could not escape love, the very thing that had kept me mobile since the day I realized I was capable of giving and receiving it.

I can't tell if wanting you is selfish or stupid.

Don't go through the process, but GROW through it.

What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.

I'm a mad lover of sport. You cannot say a bad word to me about sports. So I know business is involved and I know it can be cynical, and, of course, I watch it, but for me it's pure.

One must eliminate the traditional and cling to the essential.

There is something in us that is wiser than our head.

What was I thinking? Fact is I wasn't thinking. I didn't want to think. I wanted to feel.

We cannot love when we feel fear. When we release the fearful past and forgive everyone, we will experience total love and oneness with all.

The real beggar is indeed the true and only king.