The imagination says listen to me. I am your darkest voice. I am your 4 a.m. voice. I am the voice that wakes you up and says this is what I'm afraid of. Do not listen to me at your peril.... The imagination is not our escape. On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.

There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.

1975 is as much a historical document as 1803.

You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."

How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.

You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.