As soon as the dirt is hitting the casket, it'll all be forgotten.

I write for an audience that likes what I like, reads what I read, thinks about the things I think about. In many ways, this puts me in opposition to the people who go to the theater generally.

I was definitely surprised when Talk Radio took off as a play. As a film it has become somewhere between a popular thing and a cult thing.

If all I ever wrote about was inner city freaks, I think it would be dishonest.

For a long time, my shows were about people walking out or about getting my gigs canceled or having the presenter not wanting to pay me.

It's a mental fake-out to myself. I make believe I'm making a new show so I forget the material I was working on and make up some fresh material.

I don't know anybody who does what I do. I'm very underground.

If you say city to people, people have no problem thinking of the city as rife with problematic, screwed-up people, but if you say suburbs - and I'm not the first person to say this, it's been said over and over again in literature - there's a sense of normalcy.

I'm always surprised by things that happen to my work.

I write my plays to create an excuse for full-tilt acting and performing.

I'm not hip, I'm not cool, I'm not glib.

I know that I'm inadequate, but I never thought that at seventeen. I thought I was doing the best I could. I thought I was being idealistic.

I do write about people who are complex and are striving with something and can't quite get past their own stuff, which would be a proxy for myself because that's what the deal is with me.

I write, but I also act.

As soon as the dirt is hitting the casket, it'll all be forgotten.

I'm very underground.

The world intrudes in my brain daily. Since my brain is dripping with all kinds of stuff that's out there in the world, that I can't seem to be able to shut out, it has to end up being in my work as well.

I'm not a light-hearted person, so I can't think light-hearted at work.

I provide the bricks and mortar with the words and situations - the director and the actors and the designers build the house.

Ensemble is hard to do. It's like 3-D chess.

Well, the real Eric Bogosian is pretty self-conscious of himself.

If we all knew we were going to live to be 150 years old, we'd all approach our lives very differently.

I started acting when I was in high school, started writing when I got to New York in 1975.

I love playing other people's work. I love acting.

As soon as the dirt is hitting the casket itll all be forgotten.

My humour and my work ethic definitely come from my Scottish side, and I have to say the sense of humour doesn't really translate when I'm in America.

A good title holds magic, some cognitive dissonance, a little grit between the teeth, but above all it is the jumping-off place into wonder.

That crafty kindness which inveigles me to sacrifice principle is the serpent in the grass deadly to the incautious wayfarer.

They say that when a woman wants to end a relationship, she cuts off all of her hair. I've done that twice in my marriage but am still married.

Four years of Jimmy Carter gave us two titanic Reagan landslides, peace and prosperity for eight blessed years - and even a third term for his feckless vice president, George H.W. Bush.

I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.

Every good thing begins with one positive thought.

Our lives are like islands in the sea or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves ... But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground and the islands also hang together through the oceans bottom.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

I wanted to be a brain surgeon, but I had a bad habit of dropping things.

We've killed a million Iraqis since the start of the Gulf war - mostly by blocking humanitarian aid.

I've bought clothes based on record covers. Particularly from the formative music that turned me onto it in the first place when I was a kid, with the Beatles and the Small Faces. A lot of those Sixties soul artists were in really sharp sharkskin or mohair suits, and Motown artists looked amazing.

We need new medical approaches to preventing and/or curing disease. We need new scientific approaches to generating, storing, and being more efficient with energy. Maybe we need more space exploration. Maybe we need more undersea exploration.

I am a bookworm.

It's a rock 'n' roll thing to have one-night stands.

In Kevin's movies I would like to stay Jay.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another falls to pieces.

In my next life, I want to be Jann Wenner.

Gimme: an agreement between two losers who can't putt.

If all ideas have to be bought, then you have an intellectually regressive system that will assure you have a highly knowledgeable elite and an ignorant mass.

When it comes to jobs, President Obama makes the Jimmy Carter years look like good old days. If we fired Jimmy Carter then, why would we rehire Barack Obama now?

I did not have a mobile phone in 1993. No one did, except the occasional banker or Hollywood star seeming smart, or the main character in 'American Psycho.' In 1993, every day was 'let's get lost.' I could walk Greenwich Village for hours and not be found.

You can sit down with Reason or Ableton and literally in a couple of hours make a very good-sounding record. But then a lot of people become contented with that, rather than pushing themselves to making something that sounds great.

What's good is that my music is different from everyone else's. It's got the soul element, like Duffy, but it's not very retro. It's a contemporary, pop, fresh sound. That's what makes it different.