A Bright Ray of Darkness

Thank God. You are now a little bit lighter, you are a little bit more you. ’Cause if you can lose it—a car, an idea, a belief, a woman—it wasn’t yours.

You do not need to be depressed about getting a divorce, cowboy. You may feel like you are dying, but let me tell you, you were dead! But the thing is, dead people don’t know they’re dead. You’re crying ’cause you are getting pushed through some kind of rebirth canal. Wake up and serve those children. Get the best custody deal you can—I don’t care if it’s one stinkin’ day a year—it will be one stinkin’ day a year they get to have a grown man for a father. You are a good man—go find a good woman—and have a good life. ‘Nice’ is not a bad word. Nice partner equals nice life. Crazy partner equals crazy life—you get it?

Music is constructed in notes. Language in words. Both are communicating. Music is a language of feeling, the heart. Words are the music of the mind. Theater is their marriage.

This is who Shakespeare was meant for: not The New York Times! Not intellectuals. Just plain folks. You play Shakespeare’s music right for a real house and that shit goes up all by itself.

I looked around me and absorbed the peace of a sprawling bustling city stopped dead, socked in snow. My puppy jumped and barked, twisting and sliding. I was instantly wildly grateful just to be awake and witness all this stillness. I don’t ever want to die, I thought, I want to live forever.

a man needs to aspire to greatness and if he gives up on his hope for excellence, his soul dies

People love to apply themselves to games, jobs, relationships, politics, to create the illusion of meaning...If I can just heal my shoulder, then I could be a quarterback! If only I could finish this documentary and tell the story of my great-uncle to the world; then I would matter. If I was a movie star, then I would exist. People will light a crack pipe or steal a television just to try and feel that they exist

Our actions are the ground we walk on.

the actual joy of acting lies in the absence of personality.

Men are weak and silly and they admire strength and goddamn it, I had it.

I feel the same about cocaine as I do about eating meat,” she said. “It’s vile and ultimately morally reprehensible, but as long as I don’t pay for it—I find it quite enjoyable.

Everything that’s happening, is happening inside the self. And whatever the self is, it is not William Harding the movie actor or the adulterer. Whatever the self is will not die when your body has worms crawling through your eye sockets.

It’s funny—but there will be no need for insurance in heaven. None at all. And there will be so much need for poetry and songs and jokes. People will value what you’ve learned. It doesn’t matter if you can make a living. Shakespeare will be important. You will be so valuable, William. And I will just sit there listening, realizing how I’ve misspent my life.

the hollow rumble of wings, the movement of darkness, and the stillness of light.

That’s the point of acting: to bring about awareness of humanity, to conjure compassion, and to alleviate shame.

Watching love die: that’s an ornery armor-piercing bullet. When taking the kids to school, the laundry, and the dishes rain down on the last remaining coals of your romance like piss on a morning campfire. When all you’re left with is enough smoke to choke on. Then your heart is dead.

At around twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or thirty years old, after my kids were born, I figured I'd hit some plateau that was adulthood---where I believed things would just stay level for about forty years while I would do great work and have interesting experiences---then rather uneventfully I would begin to decay and die. But this was just not the case. I was not on a plateau. I was descending, tripping, stumbling, and burning. My whole being, or personality or self or whatever is supposed to be the seat of me, or the soul behind my eyes, was being boiled away in a giant iron cauldron like the flavor leaving a carrot.

It’s our job to transform literature into an event. We do this with why and how. Why our character speaks and how our character speaks.

the theater is the living consciousness of the world.

Luck is the residue of design. A man makes being there for his son a priority—chances are good that boy’ll turn out safe. You understand me?” He looked at me head-on, the white hospital light hitting his age-spotted face directly. “What I’m saying is, being in a healthy marriage takes two. Being a good father…all that takes is you.

There is a quiet place, a room inside my guts where my head and my heart meet, where bad news is understood before it's spoken, where I am conscious even when I'm asleep, where my dreams are remembered.

There are only two kinds of Shakespeare productions; ones that change your life, and ones that suck shit. That's it. Because if it doesn't change the audience's life... the production has failed.

It seemed the fluid in my inner ears was not level and that the separation from Mary was the cause.