Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I had a definite sense of somehow being a passenger in an evil vehicle crusing through Paradise.
I try not to be in situations where I'm being grabbed at. For the most part, you can avoid them.
People are starved for a way of life - they're hunting for a way to be or to act toward the world.
I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
More than anything, falling in love causes a certain female thing in a man to manifest, oddly enough.
You sometimes use the excuse, 'I'm a writer, dammit, I can do anything I want,' but that doesn't work.
In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man.
If you start trying to figure out yourself from the image everyone has of you, you run into a dead end.
Personality is everything that's false in a human: everything that's been added on to him and contrived.
A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.
The funny thing about having all this so-called success is that behind it is a certain horrible emptiness.
You don't have to do anything in the movies. You just sit there. Well, that's not entirely true. You do less.
What I'm after is something different than supplying people with the idea that I'm writing an important play.
Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.
Ive been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
I've been so spoiled in the theater, writing plays where I can just do exactly what I want and nobody messes with me.
When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.
I keep my horses out in the open, but when I was working the ranches, I had to clean the stalls. It was a horrible job.
I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
I think comedy's harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen... oddly enough.
I always thought the desert was the antithesis of peace - something that attacks you. So you don't go to the desert for peace.
It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
I know, as an actor, you have to negotiate, but I can't handle the whole idea that art and commerce are synonymous. It drives me nuts.
This isn't champagne anymore. We went through the champagne a long time ago. This is serious stuff. The days of champagne are long gone.
When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.
With acting, you can find a way to make it interesting for yourself, if nobody else - even on big-budget films. But you're very much on your own.
I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.
When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'
There are places where writing is acting and acting is writing. I'm not so interested in the divisions. I'm interested in the way things cross over.
My dad had a lot of bad luck. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one.
When you're looking for someone, you're looking for some aspect of yourself, even if you don't know it ... What we're searching for is what we lack.
I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?
Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.
I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.
People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.
I stay away from heavy-handed stuff, the good guy and the bad guy. It just doesn't interest me; all it does is create more fences between people, I think.
It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.
When you write a play, you work out like a musician on a piece of music. You find all the rhythms and the melody and the harmonies and take them as they come.
When I just sit around my house and work, I can work two, three hours, and then I go off and ride a horse or do something that I perceive to be a lot more fun.
I think most writers, in a sense, have this desire to disappear, to be absolutely anonymous, to be removed in some way: that comes out of the need to be a writer.
I basically live out of my truck - I mean from place to place. I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say, but it's true.
The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.
I think Bolano had a generosity about him that was unique. He seemed to include so many people in the circle of his adventures, whereas I felt like I was pretty selfish.
Grief is bizarre territory because there's no predicting how long it'll take to get over certain things. You just don't know how long it's going to resound in your life.
Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.
When I first started, I didn't really know how to structure a play. I could write dialogue, but I just sort of failed beyond that, and kind of went wherever I wanted to go.
On stage, you're not limited at all because you're free in language: language is the source of the imagination. You can travel farther in language than you can in any film.
More than any other art form I know of in America, country music speaks of the true relationship between the American male and the American female... Terrible and impossible.