Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.

To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable.

I hate vacations. There's nothing to do.

My tendency as an actor was to correct people, was to say, 'What if we tried it this way, what about if we tried that way?' That's terrible habit for an actor, but that's a good habit for director. So I became a director.

For it is written that just as it is forbidden to partake of the forbidden, it is forbidden not to partake of the permitted.