Being gay immediately placed me outside the values of the society I was growing up in. Apartheid was a very patriarchal system, so its assumptions seemed foreign to me from the outset. I've always had the advantage of alienation.

I'm fascinated by how much has changed from one generation to another. There are young people growing up now for whom apartheid is just a distant memory and the idea of military service is an abstract notion.

There aren't a lot of 'Aha!' moments in writing.

Perhaps cliche is nothing more than the weight of the past pinning down your mind. In this sense, imaginative freedom is a way of finding the future, though it isn't so easy to do.

Because of my voice, speaking words which had been carefully chosen, women had used money they had set aside for other purposes to buy war bonds.

It's always been my dream to be in a war film.

The war on drugs is not being won, and it continues to threaten stability and democracy not only in the Andes but throughout the Caribbean as well, where tiny police and military forces are outclassed by the sophisticated equipment in the hands of traffickers passing through the region on the way to their market in this country.

Not even my excellent training at Juilliard prepared me for my first movie role, where I played a transsexual who falls in love with a military guy in 'Soldier's Girl.'