If you find an occupation you love and spend your entire life working at it, is that enough?

I'd rather be called a N*gger than a Slave.

I find that when I am actually writing, I enter a zone of concentration too small to admit my troubles.

I begin to feel like I was in the last generation of Americans who took a civics class.

To die is one thing. How much worse to know that all the life that ever existed on this planet, and all it ever achieved, was to be obliterated?

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

If there is such a thing as a lock on an Oscar nomination, ... Hoffman has one.