“The one hour live debate in the West Wing that we did was one of the most exciting times for me on stage or on camera, because anything could go wrong.”

Be as smart as you can, but remember that it is always better to be wise than to be smart.

It’s too bad I’m not as wonderful a person as people say I am, because the world could use a few people like that.

It’s nice to have more time to work on the character, and to have big scenes to play. But if there’s something playable there, and if it’s interesting to do, then that’s nice.

I’m most at home on the stage. I was carried onstage for the first time when I was six months old.

It’s not an epitaph. I felt I could look back at my life and get a good story out of it. It’s a picture of somebody trying to figure things out.

Selling out was frowned on, whereas now you can major in it at business school.

They wont all lie to you but a lot of them will. And itll be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes.

I really don’t like plays or movies that service propaganda.

Life is great-I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it.

I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup.

Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; … it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.

Several thousand people had been locked up unjustly and, by an incredible coincidence, all in the same prison. On the other hand, they knew an awful lot about how to knife somebody.

I find myself going to places where I really have no business, speaking to these people in a whole other field that I have no extensive knowledge of. But I do it very often because it scares me.

When does she do all this thinking? We’re together all the time but she thinks deeply about things and with feeling and she can remember the facts. We’ve been married 48 years.

A taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.