Art - I had never thought of that as a career because it was like something I did so naturally, and it was fluid, and it is. And even though I still admire literature as the superior art form, I have to admit that art, for me, that's it; that's what I'm good at, and that's what I should be concentrating on.

I feel sorry for kids nowadays, because in the majority of schools across the country, the arts have been eliminated from the curriculum. There's no art; there's no music. In some cases they've taken away the libraries. They don't do theater. And these are the things that speak to the human soul.

Leaders of the world, my message to you is simple: to achieve universal peace and understanding on this planet you have only to speak plainly, even though you may look foolish. This is a thousand times better than looking good and talking nonsense.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

If, for some reason, I cannot bear to work on something that needs to get done, I'm not going to force that. I'll just take a mental vacation. I think the best solution sometimes to working out a problem is to walk squarely away from it.

The odd thing about recurring dreams is that, no matter how many times you dream the same thing, it always takes you by surprise.

I used to teach on a college level, and I've taught in schools where kids just wanted to be artists, and I used to be furious with them if they didn't read, because they just seemed so - their education seemed so thin if all they could do was pick up a paint-loaded brush and fling it at a canvas. I mean, there was nothing to express there, except maybe their own personal feelings. But if they're not - if they don't have a grounding in the way these things have been expressed by other people down through the centuries, then they're lost.