The truth was that, you know, there was no reason to send me to Shattuck Military School. But it was a disciplinarian school.

Women are just more oriented toward feelings - and I don't mean that in a negative way. But with a male actor and a male director, the emotional exploration can only go so far. With a female director, you can end up exploring so many more depths.

We truly have an ancient part of the brain that was about survival when we were prey but we seem to have gone past prey. We eat everything and nothing eats us.

After Civil Rights, it was very awkward for whites and blacks. We didn't know how to talk to each other.

The idea of how to read a poem is based on the idea that poetry needs you as a reader. That the experience of poetry, the meaning in poetry, is a kind of circuit that takes place between a poet, a poem and a reader, and that meaning doesn't exist or inhere in poems alone.

We've always been suburb people, and we lived in the East Bay when I was in Oakland. This time around, we're staying in the city, and my kids are getting that city life experience, which is something you don't get too much of in Alabama.

Each of us is living our own private journey, and the more we know about each other, the healthier and happier the world will be.

We've learned a huge amount from organisations like Seva Mandir and Pratham, for example. In my personal experience, these organisations work on a very large scale with very poor people.