I grew up. I began to think the United States had some problems that really required the help of artistic people to solve. And I gave myself permission to be a writer instead of a civil servant.

After being in one movie, it didn't seem like that would be my life. I had done several jobs, briefly. I'd been a shipping clerk, I worked in a copy shop, I didn't think the acting was going to go on and on.

You're always fighting the contradiction between the supposed intimacy of a two-person conversation and the blunt reality that you're trying to sell the play to people who are sitting maybe too far away from you.

I have an enormous appetite to see life as I know it presented in front of my eyes.

I was clever enough to know that John Donne was offering something that was awfully enjoyable. I just wasn't clever enough to actually enjoy it.

When I was a child, I did always feel that people were hiding things, and that they weren't expressing their true feelings. When adults are too complicated, and cover their emotions with layers of well-intentioned subterfuge, the child isn't seeing reality clearly enough and gets upset.

I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. The way I write is about life and is quite truthful, and there is a kind of brutal side to the relationship, and to the feelings, that makes it somewhat painful, but I think it's a very intense portrait of the relationship of two people. And a bit about what people feel like when they're alone, because it all takes place in one day, and during the day, they spend a lot of time alone in their different - you get to imagine what their fantasy lives are like.