I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.

I guess we all have some sort of Rubicon that we haven't crossed in our lives and we've thought about for who knows how long. And for me, it's writing.

I do think that the imagination you create yourself when you're reading, to create the tone and the accent of the world, is an individual accomplishment that someone is imposing upon you by listening to them read it. Because you're listening to their interpretation, and their emphasis would probably be different from the one that your brain makes while you're reading it.

I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.

It's amazing being a member of perhaps the last analog generation - being born in the late '40s, growing up in the '50s and '60s, when it was still a very analog world. And in New Orleans those days, the country was just next door, as it were. You didn't have to travel miles and miles to get out in the woods. There's tons of fishing, obviously, in New Orleans, and tons of hunting. That was part of the cycle of life, to get fresh meat from the butcher or go duck hunting and get it yourself. It wasn't malicious or insensitive. It was just there, and you used it.

I wrote as a teenager, and once I started acting, you know, you're learning lines, you're doing other people's words, it takes up a lot of time. Especially if you're dedicated to what you're doing, you're trying to do a decent job at it. But I would have said to myself, "Write more, please."

The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'.