When I was six, right before I started swimming, we went to a national competition here in Maryland and watched Michael Phelps swim, and I got to meet him afterwards, and I got his autograph. Fast forward nine years, and I'm at the Olympics with him,...
When you're on the court, there is certain things that you would do that you wouldn't do off the court. When you get off, you obviously have to be gracious and a humble person. When you are on the floor, be a team player. Championships are what you a...
Once I was walking from The Mercer in New York - because otherwise I don't walk anywhere - and this woman paparazzo who was following me fell over a fire hydrant and her whole tooth went through her lip. I leant over her, saying, 'Are you all right?'...
It's a new day at the Department of Interior, and we need to examine what makes the most sense for the American people. These are American resources and American treasures, and we need to make sure we're providing the right kind of protection, oversi...
A novel can do something that films and TV usually can't - a glimpse inside the characters' heads. I write very tight third person point of view, so the reader is right behind the eyes of each character, seeing what they see and feeling what they fee...
No more apologies! So we're poor! All right, we're poor! This is America! And America is one place in this sorry world where people Shouldn't to apologize for being poor. The question in America should be, 'Is this guy a good citizen? Is he honest? D...
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away - even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time t...
To be fair, she called this morning. I stared at the phone. Circled it on my bed. And, eventually, it stopped ringing. If it had been important, she would’ve called back, right? That was the line of thought that ran through my head until halfway th...
There are so many remarkable playwrights working right now, that I see everything I can. Annie Baker is a genius, I'll see anything she writes. The same for Lynn Nottage, Cynthia Hopkins, and Lisa D'Amour. Anything they've got going on, I'll go see.
You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on th...
You could look at people in India and say we are manufacturing the cabin that is going to be a part of the U.S. President's helicopter. That's a pretty big deal, right? There are 11 other heads of state who we support, but the fact is, to me, it's a ...
I guess it was but I think peoples morality has changed. It's gotten more liberal and more diverse and even in a sense much more fundamental, you take the fundamental religious right in this country, its got to go back about 50 years.
I remember when I interviewed at MSNBC, one of the first things they said to me was, 'In your tapes, you had a mustache, right?' I said, 'Yeah, I recently took it off.' I said, 'If you hire me, you get to decide if you want it or not.' They said, 'No...
I carry Yeats with me wherever I go. He's my constant companion. I always can find some comfort in Yeats no matter what the situation is. Months and months and months go by and I know I need to switch to Shelley or somebody else, but right now Yeats ...
I was a student of Sanford Meisner for three years at the Neighborhood Playhouse, and I studied with Lee Strasburg for five years and became a member of the Actors Studio. What I studied came right from the horse's mouth. My students have a lot to le...
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from ...
I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that - you can have it just the next minute; you can press the button and just have it.
I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, 'Nobody under 40,' or 'Nobody under 25.' With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative te...
No one intimidates me because I'm not trying to do what you do, because I can't do what you do. I can only do what Mary J. Blige can do, so that relaxes me right there, and it gets me out of the competition and that whole thing.
Gun control means being able to hit your target. If I have a 'hot button' issue, this is definitely it. Don't even think about taking my guns. My rights are not negotiable, and I am totally unwilling to compromise when it comes to the Second Amendmen...
I will simply express my strong belief, that that point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all, not only in things of natural philo...
