It took me forever, learning improvisation, because I had studied with Lee Strasberg - I dropped out of Chicago and went to his classes in New York for a couple of years, once or twice a week. What I didn't realize was I was learning directing because he wasn't all that good about acting, not for me.

You can always tell gifted and highly intelligent people as they always turn to the past. Any young person who knows anything that happened before 1980, or 1990, or 2000 for that matter, is immediately someone who is intelligent, probably creative, maybe a writer. Nobody who is drawn to the past and learning about the past is not gifted.

Most great plays of the past lose their grip on immediacy; on application to our lives right now.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

I don't desire happiness. I think it's a myth, and I don't think it's... and it makes you complacent. I feel very satisfyingly uncomfortable. I have the freedom to feel uncomfortable in the way I want to, is maybe a way to put it.

I can still remember the first time I heard a Beatles song. It was the fall of 1964, my second year in an American school after my family moved back from overseas, and I was standing on the corner of 64th street and First Avenue with my friend Larry Campbell.

Mothering has been the richest experience of my life, but I am still opposed to Mother's Day. It perpetuates the dangerous idea that all parents are somehow superior to non-parents.

It is not good not to have health insurance; that leaves the family very vulnerable.