If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

Trying to lead an interesting life, a fruitful life, is a big challenge.

Everything is painful, so why not be honest about the pain?

If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a show. Then the director takes that and hires people. It's like trying to build a house without any bricks.

Where the terror is, you must go.

All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it.

Theatre is the safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done.

People ask me if I believe in things: in God, in astrology, and I say, absolutely! I believe in everything! And I believe in its opposite. Like the positive and negative volts on a battery, you need both for power.

I have doubts! I have such doubts!

There are people who...tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it! It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue.

I'd like to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.

Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.