If some gang were threatening your family, you'd go looking for someone butch to help, right? Any maybe if your mother were sick or something, you'd find someone a bit more fey.

My father just got out of the Betty Ford Clinic. He's in his 60s, and this was the first time he ever did anything like that.

You're only as sick as your secrets. Either it comes out their way or my way. I talk about myself behind my back. And I'm funny about it.

There are very few women from my mother's generation who worked like that, who just kept a career going all her life and raised children and had horrible relationships and lost all her money and got it back again.

What I really like is the marriage of both [writing and acting] - for instance, with Postcards. I don't actually act in it, but I worked on it with Mike [Nichols] as I went along, creating the character, so it was a bit like acting for me.

As you get older, the pickings get slimmer, but the people don't.

Actually, social drug-taking went kind of low-key for a couple of years. Probably because of AIDS, people got very conscious of their health. But it seems to be making a comeback. Just the other night I was at a party where people kept disappearing into the bathroom every few minutes. I'm glad I did all that in my 20s and that I'm done with it. And that I wrote about it in Postcards from the Edge.