I must confess that when I'm alone in my study, here in New York, writing; that's when I'm happy.

The Pivot Questionnaire that I ask other people, when I have on rare occasion answered it, the answer to the question, "What turns you on?" Is words. Not mine, other people's. Words, words, words, that's what turns me on.

I love writing. I like reading, other people, not myself.

I'd been on everybody else's show and there was always a preinterview. Somebody would come with a tape recorder and you'd talk for three or four hours, and they'd take it back and it would be transcribed, and it would be given to the writers, those many writers you see on all those shows, Larry King, Letterman, Leno, etc. And then they choose the answers that will be most evocative on their show.

If I were to ask you for example right now to go back with me and define those moments in your life that shaped you as a person and you began to reexamine them, something would happen.

I stopped writing at the age of 18. I had written incessantly before that. I read, of course, because I was in university, but I wasn't going to write. I wasn't going to do any of those dangerous things. I was going to be a stolid, bourgeois lawyer.

I became a professional actor in Detroit and I was able to earn some money. It was a good job because it permitted me to study. It fit perfectly with school.