It's very important to transcend places that hold us.

Meryl and Katharine Hepburn are probably the two greatest actresses of this and the last century.

I played Othello, but I didn't sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn't do me any good.

When you look in one direction where Troy's chair was, you could see out through the yard across the street, there was an old cork bar advertisement for five cents. We wanted it to feel like this was real life [in Fences] and that it extended blocks and blocks.

If it ain't on a page, it ain't on a stage.

I worked with Sidney Lumet years ago, and we had a long rehearsal process, and he would tape out the entire set on the stage, so I stole that from him.

I remember my mother and father arguing about light bulbs because my father thought he could save money by putting 25-watt bulbs instead of 60-watt bulbs and my mother was trying to explain to him that her children needed to learn to read so that they could go to college. He couldn't see that.