If 50 percent of your career is not filled with failure, you're not really successful.
I can't pass up a blank book when I see it in a bookstore. And I write a sentence in it, and then I put it away.
I'd like to be doing quality acting in a quality role and making as many people as possible happy.
I don't have anything against audiobooks. I actually did a couple of them - but not many. I just never got into it, timing-wise. I don't listen to them, if that's any indication of my feelings about them. I'd rather read.
The sad fact is that the vast majority of drunks stay drunks. There's a small minority of us who reach that fork in the road where one side says 'live' and the other says 'drink'.
I do think that the imagination you create yourself when you're reading, to create the tone and the accent of the world, is an individual accomplishment that someone is imposing upon you by listening to them read it. Because you're listening to their interpretation, and their emphasis would probably be different from the one that your brain makes while you're reading it.
I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.
Be careful out there. There are things that go bump in the night. Actually, there are things that go 'Give me your wallet or I'll kill you' in the night.
I'd turn off the internet for a month and make us actually talk to each other, and be responsible for your opinions and not be able to hide behind the anonymity of the cyber-wall to speak your mind. To actually have to face people and see their reactions and discuss it - actually discuss it. It won't happen. Unless the grid goes down.
I certainly don't condemn anyone who listens to audiobooks. It seems to me that any way we get good literature in our brain is worthwhile.
I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.
Write more. That's the advice I would give myself.
Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.
The copies of The Catcher In The Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird that I own look like they were printed yesterday, and there's not a nick, not a blur, there's not any fading on the jacket at all, because they were taken and protected. A limited edition, by nature, is limited, and also probably more protected because of that. I'd rather have a first trade edition than a special one of 25 that was made years later, even if it's signed by the author. The trade edition is the Holy Grail.
It's amazing being a member of perhaps the last analog generation - being born in the late '40s, growing up in the '50s and '60s, when it was still a very analog world. And in New Orleans those days, the country was just next door, as it were. You didn't have to travel miles and miles to get out in the woods. There's tons of fishing, obviously, in New Orleans, and tons of hunting. That was part of the cycle of life, to get fresh meat from the butcher or go duck hunting and get it yourself. It wasn't malicious or insensitive. It was just there, and you used it.
I was a French Quarter rat from the moment I could get on a bus by myself and go to the French Quarter. I played music most of my early life and it just seemed that to entertain people was a really good thing to do.
I wrote as a teenager, and once I started acting, you know, you're learning lines, you're doing other people's words, it takes up a lot of time. Especially if you're dedicated to what you're doing, you're trying to do a decent job at it. But I would have said to myself, "Write more, please."
I guess we all have some sort of Rubicon that we haven't crossed in our lives and we've thought about for who knows how long. And for me, it's writing.
I don't celebrate birthdays much, except for decade-wise. It's not a really big thing.
I certainly don't take life lightly. To respect the product that you're using, I think, is very important. I think it does connect you a little bit more.
Unfortunately, I'm not a history buff. I don't read biographies, except of some of those writers whom I've collected over the years - particularly Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller, people like Charles Bukowski and John Fante and David Foster Wallace.
The only thing I haven't done as an actor, other than Thai puppet theater somewhere, is act on a Broadway stage.
Again, as egotistical as I am, as self-centered as I am, and as much as I love strangers idolizing me, I find it very crass to be self-promoter in a way.
I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.
Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.
