I've been in Chicago for every Christmas of my life.

I was not the kid that hung out at the arcade.

No one's just going to hand you a career. I waited for years for someone to hand me one and it never happened.

You can't make a cloudy day a sunny day, but can embrace it and decide it's going to be a good day after all.

I just had to be strong enough to allow myself to be vulnerable. Great Lesson. For art and for life.

You just have to decide how close you want them. Not every person in your life needs to be your best friend: some can be friends or just friendly acquaintances.

Along time ago I asked myself do I want to be right or do I want to be kind; I opted for kind.

I try not to plan ahead. I just kind of try to think in the moment. I always believe everything will work out the way it's supposed to.

That was the most offensive thing I've ever seen in 20 years of teaching - and that includes an elementary school production of hair.

Stay fluid and roll with those changes. Life is just a big extended improvisation.

I've just always loved singing, and I come from a family that loves singing around the kitchen table.

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it 'vegetable soup'. I called it inedible slop.

The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart”.

...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.''What is that?'' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

If you make action movies, the critics will savage you, and then your movies are outdated the following week with the new wave of special effects.

Daddy, when he drank, just became sweeter. There wasn't a mean thought in his body. I've always said he was like a drunk Jimmy Stewart.

Exaggeration is my only reality.

To dispense with ceremony is the most delicate mode of conferring a compliment.

As a kid books changed how I looked at the world and helped me understand things. Books still deepen me and open my heart.

A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.