I'd like to be honest to my time, and I lived from 1946, and I want to understand why our country, which I love so much, and was a great country when I was young, it seemed, became this monster vampire on the face of humanity- a vampire squid, to quote Matt Taibbi, sucking out the juices of all mankind. Why? It's a basic question.

When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process.

Now, we live in an age where we have so much information that we do tend to overload. The Greeks did too, though.

My ego is nothing - look what Alexander the Great achieved. And I felt he was a figure outside time, a figure we don't even understand, because he's frankly pre-Christian, and his concepts of honor go back to Homer.

I wish that George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, because he would have seen history in a different light. He would've experienced it in a different light because I don't think he understood the nature of war.

As a dramatist, I don't have politics.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.