The best way to prepare for a night out with a Shakespearean tragedy is to do a bit of reading up in the afternoon, eat a light supper - perhaps Welsh rarebit - and then arrive early to do some stretching exercises in the foyer before curtain-up.
I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.
My parents always kept us in the house. We weren't allowed to spend the night at other people's houses. We were sheltered kids.
Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?
One night, I went out with my teammates. I don't drink alcohol, so I wasn't drinking. This girl walked up to me; she was talking to me. She was like, 'Why aren't you drinking?' I was like, 'I just don't drink. Alcohol is nasty.' She said, 'I might have something for you.' She went and got a Shirley Temple. Then I was like, 'Ohhh, OK.'
Programmers have been wandering out and shooting a shotgun into the night sky and hoping they hit something, and I end up paying $150 for channels full of nothing I want to watch.
It is hard to be unhappy in a gay bar where everyone's singing show tunes! In fact, I've spent many a night in those kind of places - in that particular place, actually - Marie's Crisis: it's truly a New York establishment.
If it's Saturday night, and you're sitting on your couch watching 'Showtime at the Apollo,' then you're not a man's man.
It's marvelous when you visit Tokyo: they have these clubs, and they'll have 'Motown Night' or 'The Beatles - Totally Authentic and Live!' You know it's shrunk, but at least there's some sort of youthful figure to it. Whereas, the blues scene in Europe is more like, 'Here we go again.'
Anyone who has ever sat in a train as it rushes through a dark night will know that sometimes there are long minutes when the coaches slide smoothly along without so much as a shudder.
Last night, two men tried to force my shutters. I recognized them: they are two of Rodin's Italian models. He told them to kill me. I am in his way; he wants to get rid of me.
With 'Sierra,' this mean girl had all these kids bullying me - and I wrote the first verse and chorus the night before Tae and I came to Nashville.
There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.
I do feel like anything benefits from character logic. That can be from the dumbest ad to the greatest Shakespearean drama to the silliest 'Saturday Night Live' sketch. There is a certain specificity in detail, which you can get when you're paying attention to stuff like that.
I think people want very much to simplify their lives enough so that they can control the things that make it possible to sleep at night.
Winning the Oscar was like winning all the prizes in one single night that I never won as a kid.
In the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
If there's a problem, we at Wine Library never tell ourselves that once we handle this issue, we'll never have to deal with the person again. We talk to every single person as though we're going to wind up sitting next to that person at his or her mother's house that night for dinner.
I'm petrified of spiders. I hate them. I sleep with a glass of water beside my bed every night. I woke up once to take a sip of water and almost swallowed a dead one floating in the glass.
Sitting on a plastic chair at night listening to the sea lapping below while sipping a cold beer is about as good as life gets.
