I'm a goal setter, but in broad strokes. I don't have a by-October-2009-I-want-to-be-here plan. All I do is work with an element of challenge and an element of enjoyment. With that, anything can happen.
I just happen to like the work. I like preparing for a role. I like reading. I like analyzing. I like literature. I like emotions. I like working with other actors.
Yes, I suffer terribly from depression. I have to work at being happy, it's not my natural instinct. My natural instinct is, if something wonderful happens, to throw water in my own face.
I will not do work that isn't done well or right. Stuff happens - things break, contractors don't come through - but I don't want to be responsible for not doing something correctly.
I'm not saying that experiencing loss is why I can cope with darker worlds - I'm not saying that for a second - but I think it opens up a side of you in terms of work that wouldn't be as accessible had that stuff not happened.
It's a lot of work that goes into producing and directing and all those kinds of things. It doesn't just happen. It's a lotta work. It's a lot more work than acting.
What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering.
I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.
If enough people think of a thing and work hard enough at it, I guess it's pretty nearly bound to happen, wind and weather permitting.
We still have a lot of work to do in American culture. More open-mindedness is happening - in some cases rapidly, in some, slowly.
Sure, things could always have been done better, but I just wish people would drop their political hammers for a few weeks, as happened in 2001, and work on the problem at hand.
There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the Internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn't work like that... There's a reason there are graduate schools in these departments.
If you wanted to watch me work, it would be totally boring. It would look like a Warhol film where nothing happens. I sit for 24 hours, then I scratch myself.
I think female-female relationships interest me so much more because they're so encoded. There is kind of a psychic element that happens within groups of women.
It's now taken for granted that women are in bands and you can say feminist things in your songs. But back in the early '90s, there was a lot of violence at Bikini Kill shows that people don't realize happened.
I learned that round four of a major is really not too much different than rounds one through three. I didn't keep to my game plan in the '08 U.S. Women's Open for the final round. That won't happen again!
The women's movement hit my neighborhood like a freight train. Everybody got divorced. You wonder what would have happened to women if the suburbs hadn't been built.
If you run an Internet search on Vietnam and the war, most of the information you get begins at about 1962. I think this is telling. It is missing the whole period that led up to the reasons the war happened in the first place.
Once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won. For defeat brings worse things than any that can ever happen in war.
I saw what happened when a dictator was allowed to take over a piece of a country and the country went down the tubes. And I saw the opposite during the war when America joined the fight.
I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.
