I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources.
A big part of being an actress specifically is feeling entitled to your artistic opinion, feeling that it means something, and being able to stand by it.
I think the Lower East Side inspires me. That whole neighborhood, a lot of the people that I worked with, seeing what we've gone through in life, being given an opportunity to understand who I am; my identity, my culture, and my roots.
It is a full time job being honest one moment at a time, remembering to love, to honor, to respect. It is a practice, a discipline, worthy of every moment.
Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.
Let me respond with a few points, the first being that all immigrants pay taxes, income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gasoline taxes, cigarette taxes, every tax when they make a purchase.
You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.
Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.
I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.
