“Power, for the writer….lies in his ability to reveal if only a little bit more about the complexity of humanity.”

We look too much to museums. The sun coming up in the morning is enough.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance-but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it.” Stephen Covey “It takes a deep commitment to change and an even deeper commitment to grow.

The clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time. In the street a siren howled.

Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

Some people are your relatives but others are your ancestors, and you choose the ones you want to have as ancestors. You create yourself out of those values.

I am an invisible man. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms.

Perhaps everyone loved someone; I didn’t now, I couldn’t give much thought to love; in order to travel far you had to be detached, and I had the long road back to the campus before me.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own.

Words are your business, boy. Not just the word. Words are everything. The key to the rock, the answer to the question.

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don’t think you’re very good at it – which is rubbish. You’re missing out here.

This is much more than your typical thriller. Tim Johnston has written a book that makes Gone Girl seem gimmicky . . . Johnston is an excellent writer.

When you’re on TV, you come into people’s homes. In theater and film, they go to you – to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it’s very different.

I have a final word of advice to our students. If you work very, very hard, this is the kind of actor, writer and director you may turn out to be, and if you work extra hard, this is the kind of person you may turn out to be.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself.

When I’m writing, I want to try to be seen as a good writer.

When you’re reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call “taking up with a writer,” something happens.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.