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1. Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they’d probably throw you out. That’s very hard.
2. ‘The Fever’ is a one-person play. I decided I would perform it myself, and I decided I would not perform it in theaters, because the character in the play says certain things that I meant.
3. I led the life of an intellectual up until a certain age. I remember Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ was a big favorite when I was 11. It sounded so interesting. And it really was!
4. I choose parts because I don’t want to be embarrassed when the movie comes out. What if my friends were to see the movie? What if my niece or nephew wandered into the theater and saw the movie? I don’t want to be too ashamed of it.
5. The actor’s role in the community is quite unlike anyone else’s. Businessmen, for example, don’t take their clothes off or cry in front of strangers in the course of their work. Actors do.
6. I spend most of my time thinking about things like laundry and buying stationery supplies.
7. Interestingly, the actress who, in her own persona, may be gentle, shy, and socially awkward, someone whose hand trembles when pouring a cup of tea for a visiting friend, can convincingly portray an elegant, cruel aristocrat tossing off malicious epigrams in an eighteenth-century chocolate house.
8. When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn’t have studied it even if I had heard of it.
9. You know, I haven’t written as much as most other writers. Certainly maybe those who keep a more regular schedule accomplish more.
10. I don’t have a television, and I’m just not too up on television.
11. We’re in an emergency situation. The United States has become an absolutely terrifying country, and I would hope that I could participate in some way in stopping the horror and the brutality.
12. I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they’re laughing.
13. For some reason, people find me funny. It’s quite hard to define why a thought is funny. It’s even harder to define why a person would be funny. It’s a word that I can’t define at all. But whether I know quite what it is or not, I seem to be it.
14. I probably have a higher opinion of my writing than the average person, at least when I’m in a good mood, but I don’t really think of my plays as only being relevant to a particular month or year.
15. I know that I am one and I’ve made a living as an actor and I enjoy being an actor, but when I’m not actually doing it, I forget that I do it.
16. In my early 20s, I studied history and politics, and I really thought that perhaps I would devote my life to that.
17. Patriotism is considered to be an emotion a person ought to feel. But why? Why is it nobler to love your own country than to love someone else’s?
18. My personal life is lived as ‘me,’ but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream, and become ‘someone else.’ That’s my job.
19. I’m a very lucky man. It’s a beautiful thing for a writer, to see people allowing your words to enter their own unconscious and their souls.
20. We are not what we seem. We are more than what we seem. The actor knows that. And because the actor knows that hidden inside himself there’s a wizard and a king, he also knows that when he’s playing himself in his daily life, he’s playing a part, he’s performing, just as he’s performing when he plays a part on stage.