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.

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.

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.

The essence of fascism is to make laws forbidding everything and then enforce them selectively against your enemies.

Anyone having to do with medicine will have looked at Frank Netter's art work... I decided I would make him my model... getting my degree in medical illustration and then going on to medical school.

One of the chief obstacles to intelligence is credulity, and credulity could be enormously diminished by instructions as to the prevalent forms of mendacity.

It was a mistake," you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.

Well, I got to have a project. I'm not a blue-sky guy at all. I'd never let anybody like me loose in a company.

Every stress leaves an indelible scar, and the organism pays for its survival after a stressful situation by becoming a little older.

The tyranny imposed on the soul by anger, or fear, or lust, or pain, or envy, or desire, I generally call 'injustice.'

The only enlightened masters I know are the people that I see every day and the people that I've seen through my life who have had the understanding, at some level, that we're here to express love.

Leeds are enjoying more possession now that they have the ball.

Any daily activity can be used as an opportunity for meditation.