I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.

I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

Then, when I was a senior in high school, I was kind of bereft and she put me in an acting class.

It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.

I love writing for the screen.

Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.

I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.

What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.

Then I went off to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They had a really wonderful theatre department.

My fault now is making my plays too short.

I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.

I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.

The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play.

You can't just go in there and open your mouth until the cast and director feel comfortable with you.

Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much.

Plays are so much more special if they've never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production.

That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you'll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana.

It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don't get in trouble.

I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.

The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.

I'm very into the first production of the show.

Imagine how many aspects of nature we would miss if we lived on the surface of the sun. Without inventing refrigerators, we would only know gaseous matter and never observe liquids or solids, and miss the beauty of snowflakes.

Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.

You see young people, or kids, and they're fascinated by the way people talk. And that's great. But eventually you get to the point where you think, 'You know what? I don't care how you talk, I'm just listening to what you're saying.'

I don't fault my former law firm for running their business like a business or expecting their new hire to be worth the obscene rate she was billed out at, but fun it was not.

Assumptions are the termites of relationships.

I think stutterers are funny. And I know it's rude and politically incorrect to laugh at stutterers. But I think it is okay because I know why they're funny. They make people nervous. People think, when on earth are they going to get the word out, so they start laughing out of their own nervousness.

When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11.

All the important drawings I do myself. Every single character is also done by me.

The photo collage is a way to travel that must be used with skill and precision if we are to arrive... The collage as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition A collage makes a statement.

I'm not going to be the Alabama coach.

I didn't want to just rally at the baseline, even though that happened a lot.

I love the spirit of Halloween and the energy that comes with it.

I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.

Somebody like me wouldn't have gone on to the Trisha show because I already had a public profile.

You just never know when somebody's gonna die. It could happen at any moment so you've got to really treat everybody that way. Just really let everybody know how you feel about them.

The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways.

Unfortunately, I think it's very difficult to separate policy from politics. In a perfect world, in some instances, you probably would want to. In other instances, you'd probably say that the political element is important because it should, in a perfect world, match what the stakeholders need or want, or what the public is after.

There is no doubt a president has to govern for everyone.

I shot a pilot for ABC, which I'm a bit confused about what the actual title is - I heard it was called 'Chosen.' It's directed by Roland Emmerich - the master of disaster himself - and it's his idea and concept for the show that's a supernatural thriller about good and evil set in contemporary modern day New York.

It's all about training smart.

The earth reminded us of a Christmas tree ornament hanging in the blackness of space. As we got farther and farther away it diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble the most beautiful marble you can imagine.

Female schools might be comprised in the list of those worthy the public patronage, with great propriety.