“Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.”

I’ve never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.

I think I’m a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.

I know that they want certain things and they’re in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that.

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.

If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can’t keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago.

I don’t know that it was much better thirty years ago. The music industry just wasn’t as efficient.

I actually had less time and the exact same budget on Hairspray, which was few years ago and this is a much bigger movie [then Rock of Ages]. That’s the way studios do it now.

If someone had been asked twenty years ago what direction they thought music was going in, they wouldn’t have said sampling.

Five years ago, who would have thought this possible?

Ronald Reagan perfected the subtler version long ago by talking about “welfare mothers” – a code phrase for people of colour.

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that’s all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there’s nothing left to celebrate but the dead.