Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them.
I see the kids and I feel like taking them all away to a safe place to hide until the war stops and the hunger stops and El Cua becomes strong enough to give them the care they deserve.
The colored folks been singing it and playing it just like I'm doin' now, man, for more years than I know. I got it from them.
I was a lawyer for 10 years, and several of my clients had the misfortune, through no fault of my own, of going to prison. I visited them occasionally.
Our moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Since it's based on my parents, it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.
If I get a hard audience they are not going to get away until they laugh. Those seven laughs a minute - I've got to have them.
The Kenyans beat up on the American runners in every road race every weekend of the year, but we're way ahead of them in the number and quality of our Elvis impersonators. We get our X-Men and gorillas.
I don't wear a lot of perfumey-perfumes because I think a lot of them smell like you're wearing perfume. And I don't want to smell like that.
I never played sports. I wasn't any good at them.
I only keep books that I like very much. Otherwise I'd throw them out.
Don't look at someone else and want to be them. Search within yourself and find out who you are and be someone positive.
I believe it is important for comedians to know who came before them.
I love books. I want to read them, and I want to own them so they're always available to be reread.
I like to investigate all different kinds of people, I guess, and find out what makes them who they are, and try to be honest in the portrayal, and truthful, and find out how to understand that person, how to communicate that person's experience.
When so-called child's play turns hostile, and a child becomes a victim, it is time to act. Victims of cyberbullying do not choose to participate. Rather than build character, bullying can cause children to become anxious, fearful, unhappy, and even cause them to be physically sick.
I walk out of my apartment, and St. Vincent's is standing there like a ghost ship. That was the ground zero of AIDS in New York: a conservative institution that quickly adapted to its unconventional patients and made heroic efforts to try and save them.
Few rich men own their property; their property owns them.
It took a catastrophe of socialized medicine to wake a lot of people up because it affects every single person in America, either directly or indirectly. That's when you get people's attention - when it directly affects them.
Favorite poems are like favorite children. We definitely have them but we never tell as the others would have their feelings hurt.
I'd say it's okay to be political and to be a writer. Those streams can be separate, and they can be connected; for me, they're both. Life is political, and I'm interested in my community and in a lot of issues - some of them American, some global.
When I design and wonder what the point is, I think of someone having a bad time in their life. Maybe they are sad and they wake up and put on something I have made and it makes them feel just a bit better. So, in that sense, fashion is a little help in the life of a person. But only a little.
I grew up watching period dramas, as we all did in the 1980s and '90s - endless adaptations of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens - and I loved them. But I never saw anyone like me in them, so I decided to find a story to erode the excuses for me not doing one.
Sometimes people need a kick in the pants to get them to do what they would be doing if government weren't there as a perpetual parent.
I don't put a lot of description in the books because I write books the way I like to read them, and that is I like to build images and be a creative reader, and so I write that way.
Magic touches people in the way great art does. It lets them see the world with new eyes.
I have never refused to talk to any authorities or give them any information I had.
You find out two executives are planning to break their contracts, keep the money you gave them, and steal 40 employees. What do you do? You fire them.
If we want corporations to act differently, we have to force them to do so through laws that are fully enforced and through penalties higher than the economic benefits of thwarting the laws.
Everyone's story is different, and we can't really be inside them.
Where the private sector, or anyone else, has skills, knowledge and resources that can help to deliver a high quality of education and to raise standards, we should use them.
I always wanted to be an independent maverick, writing plays and putting them on myself.
On Hillary Clinton's side, she believes she's unaccountable to the American people. She favors these old ideas about government, these - these centralized, top down solutions from Washington that keep insiders in the know and give them influence, but regular Americans have no voice.
One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.
You need to become a good listener. As you're working, you hear someone else's lines and how you absorb them becomes your acting.
One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it - in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them - that's huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us.
