Soundbite and slogan, strapline and headline, at every turn we meet hyperbole. The soaring inflation of the English language is more urgently in need of control than the economic variety.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do.

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed.

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.

Mem'ry All alone in the moonlight I can smile at the old days Life was beautiful then.

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.

I experience the grace of greater power.

I have learned that you're not perfect, and that sometimes the one you love can burn you. But it's just the fool that's looking backwards: a bitter heart turns the love we made to ashes.

I love the healthy exchange of information.

A book should be luminous not voluminous.

More than 65,000 horses were slaughtered in the United States in 2004, a 50 percent increase since 2002.

It is far more important the law should be administered with absolute integrity, than that in this case or in that the law should be a good law or a bad one.

I adore war. It is like a big picnic but without the objectivelessness of a picnic. I have never been more well or more happy.

The only reason I started using samples was because people talked about me not sounding like Kanye or The Heatmakers.