Grief is exhausting. When you learn - maybe through my age or experience - trying to harness the energy, whatever it is, muted energy or a concentration to find yourself in a place? You try to use it for when it's really necessary and can arrive.
I've forgotten what it's like to remember. I've lost the mindless confidence that a moment, an idea, a thought will be there for me later, the bravado of breezing through experience in the certainty that it will become part of my self, part of my story.
I get a little myopic in the act of doing any writing. I think I'm not as interested or not as able to write about balance, because I think there's something I want to try to get at. I'm trying to get at something about the experience of growing up or about families.
The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.
Meditation is not the construction of something foreign, it is not an effort to attain and then hold on to a particular experience. We may have a secret desire that through meditation we will accumulate a stockpile of magical experiences, or at least a mystical trophy or two, and then we will be able to proudly display them for others to see.
Mysticism, in the narrow sense, implies a specific experience which is foreign to most poets and most men, but on the other hand, it represents an instinct which is a human sine qua non.
My mythic version of America is very much about parents and children, and in my experience, the suburban setting is where that particular drama plays out. Which isn't to say that there aren't parents and children in cities or on farms. I just don't know them.
I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.
My engagement with mountains, rivers, and forests has been right from my childhood. I have lived in the jungles by myself; I have floated down rivers. So, I didn't experience these rivers, mountains, forests as some mythological figures but as thriving, living entities.
For in the works of Robert Burns we see the whole cosmos of man's experience and emotion, from zenith to nadir, from birth until death.
Foreignness is all around. Only in the heart of the heart of the country, namely the heart of the United States, can you avoid such a thing. In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.
When I'm working, I'm so narrowly focused on sound, language, rhythm, flow, that I rarely feel the emotion of the text. It's only after - long after - I've finished a piece that I can experience in any way its emotional charge.
Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.
What I want to do with my filmmaking is help kids experience the truth and wisdom of nature no matter where they are, whether or not they have the opportunity to go to a national park.
If it's good for me to go to the national team and play there - not just go there to give experience but to play and be useful - I think it's good.
I was very lucky. I left college, and Richard Eyre was in charge of the National Theatre. I was offered the lead in 'The Seagull' with no experience and went on to do five plays there.
Right before I graduated from the national theatre school, I got the part of Roxie Hart in 'Chicago' in Copenhagen. That led to me playing it here in London. I was 26 when I came over for that. It was the first thing I did as a professional, and it is still the experience of my life.
My experience with the National Theatre in Kracow often involved many changes of storyline and character. This was particularly useful when working with a director such as Pawel Pawlikowski who is quite intuitive and demands flexibility in an actor.
The deaf community is in a favorable position because they have a national theatre and training groups of their own to get them started. Deaf actors have often acquired very valuable skills and experience before they get their break.
I know from personal experience that engaging with your community and helping others helps foster a sense of shared sacrifice and - at a time when our politics seem more focused on tearing us apart than bringing us together - that shared sacrifice will help us rekindle the national unity that has made us the strongest nation in the world.
