“When I write, that takes over and I can’t do anything else.”

So I started to think like, “well if I’m going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct”.

I’ll take a break for a couple weeks for a project that is paying me money like a television project which I try to stay away from just to stay financially ahead of the game.

The scent goes right to your stomach.

You don’t really develop feelings about a place till you’ve left it. It’s like a girl or a dog.

I grew up eating hamburger helper, macaroni and cheese, and drinking lots of milk, and looked at lots of cows; but I feel like a New Yorker now, I’ve lived here for sixteen years.

When I got inside, I just sort of stood there. There’s nothing stranger than the smell of someone else’s house

Obviously the power of the Times is discouraging. It’s killing new plays, demolishing one after another.

When it’s just a few scenes and a couple of actors behaving in a room, I feel very confident with that.

A typical day for me is I’m writing when I’m not directing.

Mary’s house smelled like lemon furniture polish and oatmeal cookies and logs in a fireplace.

I would hope that the staffs at juvenile detention centers and reform schools are carefully chosen so that there is a community of support and hope.

You can always count on the New York Times to cut your legs off.

I appreciate good criticism and I think it’s really important.

You have to escape to survive, as you must survive to escape.

Grief does not expire like a candle or the beacon on a lighthouse. It simply changes temperature. It becomes a kind of personal weather system.

My work is always more emotional than I am.

I have always had this mentality because I hated to break anything on the car.

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them.

Dreams reveal we never quite get ‘over’ anything: it’s all still in there somewhere.

We don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped … We suffer, therefore we think.

It takes a mile before anything happens. And if it was a wrong turn, getting back on course takes even longer.

I didn’t want anything written about me. Then, you know, things happen, finally it’s OK and I trust Larry. Nothing about it is salacious in any way.

I won vice president of my student body in high school. That doesn’t mean anything.

I don’t talk politics and I don’t talk philosophy or anything like that, but if you look at my work, you might get an expression of me as a person.