I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.

I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.

I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.

I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure - the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play - and inelegant emotion.

Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level.

But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong.

I know it's a film and all of that, and it's a Hollywood film, but it kind of feels like this sometimes, when you're in pain and it hurts, and you're desperate. Or you are about to cross some moral line and it's so seductive and you just do... and all that.

Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice.

Always when I directed the play, I was always trying to cast people not who were necessarily like the characters, but people who I felt had the essential component that the character had, some kind of soul for it.

It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency.

The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play.

When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years.

I'm a happily married man and I think to get married you have to be optimistic.

It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way.

I'm a Golden Globe nominee, yes. It's very nice. It's a very nice thing, but I kind of think of all the awards I wasn't ever nominated for, for years and things.

A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.

I like them all - I don't always approve. I see myself as a sort of benevolent uncle to these characters, and I can see why they do what they do; sometimes they make some mistakes, but at heart I think they're decent.

There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.

Painting contains a divine force which... makes the dead seem almost alive.

I make myself proud.

Assumptions are what we don't know we are making.

The Chinese seemed to be mourning Mao in a heartfelt fashion. But I wondered how many of their tears were genuine. People had practiced acting to such a degree that they confused it with their true feelings.

I used to be good with kids but as I get older Im grumpy and terrible with them. As for doing a gig at a 6 year olds birthday party you couldnt pay me enough.

For the innocent, the past may hold a reward. But for the treacherous, it's only a matter of time before the past delivers what they truly deserve.

Istanbul is a vast place. There are very conservative neighbourhoods, there are places that are upper class, Westernised, consuming Western culture.

Whenever I write about mental health and integrative therapies, I am accused of being prejudiced against pharmaceuticals. So let me be clear - integrative medicine is the judicious application of both conventional and evidence-based natural therapies.

Only one who devotes himself to a cause with his whole strength and soul can be a true master. For this reason mastery demands all of a person.

If you're from Virginia, then you know some white people from Poquoson don't like black people.

I am choosing happiness.

I wear my pajamas. That's the thing I love most about writing. I don't get changed until I actually have to go out of the house. I'll write and take a late lunch or go to a coffee shop when I get where I can't stand the four walls anymore.

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

In Chicago it's really a case of the play's the thing - people are just so happy to be acting, you know? We were all actors - not like in New York or Los Angeles, where everyone says they are actors but they are actually waiting tables and hustling for spots in commercials.

Each man carries within him the soul of a poet who died young.

When I do an hour-and-a-half show, if I don't improvise 20 minutes worth of new material each night, I feel I've let myself down.

Pretty much from 1979 through 1988, the backbone of my career was the theater. Working on Broadway a couple of times, working off-Broadway, and also doing a lot of regional theater. Make no mistake, I lived very frugally. I had an apartment that was real cheap. I would get two or three jobs per season, and in between I'd be on unemployment.

For me, beauty comes from natural happiness. I think that a woman glows, and a man, even, when they're healthy and they're happy.

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

With Westerns you have the landscape is important, and it's empty, and only you populate it. When you populate it, you can tell any kind story that Shakespeare told, you can tell in a Western.

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone going faster than you is a maniac

One of the few things the Air Force did admit to me existed out there presently without admitting that it was Area 51 is this drone called the 'Beast of Kandahar' which does not fire missiles, unlike the Predator and the Reaper, but just conducts surveillance.

The event of the landing of these brethren upon our shores is to be, not without its beneficial effect, as well to the colored population of this country, as it promises to be to ill-fated Africa.