In Chicago, actors start up companies and get together and produce things, and there's a really rich, vibrant non-Equity theater scene out there.

I'm fascinated by Greta Garbo. My cat's named Greta, and I have a framed photograph of her from 1949.

I never thought I would work with Meryl Streep. I also love Cate Blanchett.

When you raise your voice in song to express what's going on deep inside of you, I think people just react to that because it's so truthful. It's so raw.

I love being in these ensemble comedy movies. I love working with a bunch of people and coming up with, you know, How can we make this moment funnier?

It has to come from a truthful place in order to be funny.

I looked at my mom and her life, and I thought, 'I don't want that.' I don't think my mom wanted it, either. I think my mom did want to be out there and have a career. She loved working. As soon as we were old enough to feed ourselves, she was out.

When I'm not feeling good about how I look, I figure if I just buy the right piece of clothing, I'll feel all right.

I try to dress the bottom I have. The body I have and the bottom I have. I have the intention of looking fabulous every time, and I care about it a great deal. I'm very vain.

I was filled with angst all the time, but when it came down to it, I dove into what was in front of me, and I always did my best. I invested 100 percent. And that's what saved me.

Nothing like falling in love with a dead actress to prove your sanity.

I loved working with Cybill Shepherd. We had a good time together; we enjoyed being girlfriends. It was a real comfortable fit for us. I loved putting on a suit and tie.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a boy. I really had gender issues.

I think the only way we can really get you to laugh hard is if we take it to a deep psychological place. It has to resonate with you on a really deep level in order for you to really do that good guffaw.

The comedians who I admire that are really good, they always take it to a deep psychological place.

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it.

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

There is a sociology of horses, as well as a psychology. It is most evident in the world of horse racing, where many horses are gathered together, where year after year, decade after decade, they do the same, rather simple thing - run in races and try to win.

In many ways, being honest about 'Huckleberry Finn' goes right to the heart of whether we can be honest about our heritage and our identity as Americans.

Another thing I learned is that novels, even those from apparently distant times and places, remain current and enlightening, and also comforting.

There are several methods for introducing your children to driving, and all of them are bad. Probably the worst is to put it off.

Sinclair Lewis may be ripe for a revival; his books raise several interesting issues of art and fashion.

'The Good Soldier' is an odd and maybe even unique book. That it is a masterpiece, almost a perfect novel, comes as a repeated surprise even to readers who have read it before.

I gallop and jump and ride young horses with intense pleasure.

A theory of creativity is actually just a metaphor. A pool of ideas, a well of memories, a voice.

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

Eavesdrop and write it down from memory - gives you a stronger sense of how people talk and what their concerns are. I love to eavesdrop!

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.

Some novelists are luckier than others in the eras of their formative intellectual years, but all Weltanschauungs return, which means that most novelists have at least a chance of a revival.

Most of my childhood revolved around wondering when we would be blown up by the Russians. I couldn't stand the news, I knew that if the missile were launched, mortality would arrive in half an hour, so I spent a lot of my childhood feeling that I was 30 minutes from being dead.

Oh, that sound? I'm in the hot tub, reading a novel.

When I came home for the summer after my first year of college, I told my mother that my best friend and I were driving to California. She laughed out loud - 2,000 miles in a what? Well, my best friend had an old Chevy. What could go wrong?

In his 30 years of broadcasting and publishing fiction, Garrison Keillor has set the laugh bar pretty high.

It once amused me that it took me three tries to pass my driver's test and that my driving instructor told my mother that I was the least talented person behind the wheel that she had ever taught.

When 'The Awakening' was published it was considered so scandalous it was banned in the author's home-town library, and she herself was barred from the Fine Arts Club in the same city. What the novel has to offer, among other things, is honesty.

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system.

Combined families often get bad reviews, but the family my children got when they traded away 'the suffocating four-person' nuclear one is one that has benefited all of them.

I learned why 'out riding alone' is an oxymoron: An equestrian is never alone, is always sensing the other being, the mysterious but also understandable living being that is the horse.

Novelists of a conservative or more purely aesthetic bent hold up better on the surface, but their novels go in and out of fashion according to relevance or irrelevance.

Vets do what doctors used to - diagnose the injury or the condition, patch it up as best they can and remind you that these things happen and that in life we are also in the midst of death.

There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.

I have reared, or helped to rear, five children and the scariest bit, bar none, is the learning-to-drive part. It has filled me with anxiety not only about the children, but also about my former self and my friends.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

I think that the Cold War was an exceptional and unnecessary piece of cruelty.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

Sometimes, a novel is like a train: the first chapter is a comfortable seat in an attractive carriage, and the narrative speeds up. But there are other sorts of trains, and other sorts of novels. They rush by in the dark; passengers framed in the lighted windows are smiling and enjoying themselves.

Take naps. Often new ideas come together when you are half asleep, but you have to train yourself to remember them.

Candy is my fuel. Ice cream, too.