I'm inhabiting a life I'm not supposed to be in... and at certain times in my life, I have felt a wrongness. And not a moral wrongness but a sense that this isn't what I was born to be doing.
I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'
I've had it up to my ears with the personal mythology. It's getting kind of personally sickening. The personal stuff just turns out to be misinterpreted. I've had such an earful for so long, it's gotten tedious. I figure if you stay away from it, you're safe.
I've always felt a great affinity with music. I've felt myself to be more of a musician than anything else, though I'm not proficient in any one instrument. But I think I have a musical sense of things... and writing seems to me to be a musical experience - rhythmically and in many other ways.
It's funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It's not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.
I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.
A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.
To sit on a ranch horse that's been broken in, it's like getting in a Porsche.
Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
There is this aura that the three-act play is the important one: it's the one that you do to win the Pulitzer. Some part of you falls for that, and then after a while, you don't fall for that.
I basically live out of my truck - I mean from place to place. I feel more at home in my truck than just about anywhere, which is a sad thing to say, but it's true.
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
People are starved for the truth, and when something comes along that even looks like the truth, people will latch onto it because everything's so false.
What I'm after is something different than supplying people with the idea that I'm writing an important play.
After the falling out with my father, I worked on a couple of ranches - thoroughbred layup farms, actually - out toward Chino, California. That was fine for a little while, but I wanted to get out completely, and twenty miles away wasn't far enough.
It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.
Writing for theatre is certainly different to writing an essay or any other kind of fiction or prose: it's physical. You're also telling a story, but sometimes the story isn't exactly what you intend; maybe you uncover something you had no idea you were going to uncover.
A good actor always sets you straight. If you've written a false moment and thought it was probably pretty great, the actor's gonna show you when he gets to that moment. They're the great test of the validity of the material.
