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.

I have been vain since birth. I expected other people to like what I did, although my vanity has definitely diminished over the years.

I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.

In real life, every person is the leading man or woman. We don't think of ourselves as supporting or character actors.

I grew up in a very polite family, and I suppose my parents were both very polite, and from the time I was a young boy, I suspected that there were passions seething underneath and not being mentioned, and that was something that came to preoccupy me. Somehow I had some drive to write down what people might really be thinking.

My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward.

If my relation to each and every peasant in Cambodia is indeed exactly what the principles of morality would demand it to be, it's a miraculous coincidence, because it takes a lot of effort to behave correctly in regard to my friends, and from one end of the year to another I never give those peasants a single thought.