“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.”

That’s what I like about [smoking] . . . taking a drag off of death, Mmm! Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What power! What exhilaration! Want a drag?

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

I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

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.

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

I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.

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.

I love writing for the screen.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.

Be every bar, and every star, Displayed in full and glorious manner! Blow, zephyrs, blow, keep the dear ensign flying! Blow, zephyrs, sweetly mournful, sighing, sighing, sighing!

I built a kingdom out of heartache and it is glorious.

A 100 percent elimination policy (by Ankara of the Kurds) has forced me to defense and it has become a glorious defense of a people.

I used to be someone who would not even tread on an ant. But this is a war for honor and self-defense.

Autumn can be glorious but menacing too – the long shadows, brisk winds, scurrying leaves, impending frost.

This life of ours, human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up–no more flower.

I’m my age and I feel glorious.