My ultimare goal is, without illusion and without sentimentality, merely by telling the truth as I see it, to break your heart. If I can break your heart and cause your awareness to expand to include another person's experience, even a fictional person's experience, and to inhabit for a moment their sorrow and suffering, then I think it expands us as people.

Whatever I watched, whatever I loved in 36 years of life on Earth, probably had some influence on me.

I don't think you can create effectively toward expectation. I'm not in the service business.

We live in a culture that has a real hard time distinguishing fiction from reality. Even when they're told something is fiction.

At DePauw, I was teaching writing and fiction. The things I wanted to teach, more than anything else, were form and theory of the novel, of narrative. I liked those classes.

Art was always for me an escape and a way to relate to the world around me.

You can't really judge an actor's abilities by their career, because the business is going to pigeonhole people into whatever turns a profit, and no artist is less in charge of how their work is presented than an actor, the appeal of Vince was that within a great naturalism, he can convey fierce intelligence, complex emotion, and a real warmth married to a real edge, strength and vulnerability and danger and humor. There are essential contradictions at work that makes him fascinating to watch.