The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee's for closers only.

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

Always do things the least interesting way, the most blunt way, and you make a better movie. This is my experience.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.

My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.