I love writing for the screen.

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

Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct.

There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don't even know how to say, "Hello, how do you do?" because their minds are absorbed with electronic images.

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

It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don't get in trouble.

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.