If you have value as an artist it's probably going to be in your capacity to let things inside you get past things that are placed there to keep you from telling the truth. The more you see things as clearly and coldly as you can, the more value you're going to have.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

My back went out and I gained 40 pounds while sweating over 'Perestroika.' It was incredibly hard, the hardest thing I had to do before the screenplay to 'Lincoln.'

Nobody is perfect, but life is about choices.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

For some individuals - some soldiers, some contractors - combat provides a kind of purpose and meaning beyond which all else potentially pales in comparison.

A lot of people asked us why 'Journey' didn't let them play with friends or family, and obviously we had a reason - because that would have defeated the purpose of the game. But for a game to be truly be accessible to both children and adults and to men and women, it has to allow people to play with the ones they love.