I've always felt toward the slightest scene, even if all I had to do in a scene was just to come in and say, 'Hi,' that the people ought to get their money's worth and that this is an obligation of mine, to give them the best you can get from me.

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.

The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.

I try not to think of myself in any category, and I don't ever really try to imagine myself competing with another actor. I just know I want to do the things that I would want to see, and I know the things that turn me on, whether it's on the stage, or it's a play or a film. I just kind of want to keep doing my own thing.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I believe that as a writer and a director, you're only providing the skeleton of a character, and you're hiring actors to fill it out.