I have a way of synthesizing. That's what I would encourage any young person to do: take in the ideas, the conflicts, and the world. Watch and listen and live before you go public.

I'm coming from the notion that acting is an art. It is not a business. It is about building characters, not about selling personalities.

I don't have any artifacts of my profession in my house; the Oscar is in storage.

The point is that there are challenges within techniques. When you differentiate in technique, you challenge yourself; you ask yourself the same question in a new way.

I cannot draw to save my life, and I'm not a big art scholar, but I worked with many designers throughout my career - in theater, in dance, costume designers, set designers, and I have a lot of artist friends and I do photography, and I think it's kind of in my life.

The thing that was most harmful was that there was always something that was about to happen. So I found myself indulging in the writer's luxury of doing another draft, another idea. If this project isn't happening, then I'll shelve one script and start writing another. And in that way, the years go by, and there's very little money coming in.

An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.

When a child's mind develops and is heading in a certain direction, we murder that mentality, we murder that imagination, by saying, 'Now, that is all well and good, but now sit down and start to study.'