Wisdom - meaning judgment acting on experience, common sense, available knowledge, and a decent appreciation of probability.
I've been very fortunate in that I've had wonderful relationships with people I've worked with.
San Franciscans are very proud of their city, and they should be. It’s the most beautiful place in the world.
You should prepare when you go to a public event to be public. That's when I will sign autographs. But not when you're going about your normal business.
I was producing things I was acting in, but I had never directed and I felt it was time. I was looking for a piece of material that was about behavior and feelings. When I read Judith Guest's book, I thought, This is it.
I would see my hometown, Los Angeles, change. Green space and orange groves gave way to cement, freeways flooded with traffic, and air pollution, all in the name of "progress. " I felt like I was losing my home. It had a profound effect on me, and I realized just how important nature was to my spirit, my soul, my point of view.
I was raised in California during the Second World War and into the '50s and everything was fine, everything was great. The sun always shone, everybody looked healthy and wore ties and smoked in restaurants, and there were cars for everybody - except us, because I came from a lower class neighbourhood. But [in France] I realised there was a different point of view, so when I came back to America a year and a half later I was much more focused on my own country culturally and politically.
. . . the little man's total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away.
All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.
I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.
I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.