Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

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

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.

Winning and losing is not an external game. It is an internal battle over telling yourself the truth vs. lies regarding why you haven’t stepped into the life you dreamed of.

To be great at whatever it is that you do, it's going to take some discipline to separate yourself from the average.

I think that we really fool ourselves about our ability to be safe and secure nowadays.

One old lady who wants her head lifted wouldn't be so bad, but you multiply her two hundred and fifty thousand times and what you get is a book club.

Criticism always hurts most when we deserve it.

I will wear the same thing for three years straight unless somebody, like, forces me not to. It's like, hey, I got this Gucci sweater.

The same amount of pride which makes a man treat haughtily his inferiors, makes him cringe servilely; to those above him.

In my godless household, poems were the closest we came to sacred speech -- the only prayers said.

We put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking.

To be completely enlightened means that you're a Buddha.I don't speak of enlightenment.