I really feel better about aging at the age of 86 than I did at 70.

We approached Athens from the north in early twilight, climbing a hill. When we reached its peak, we were dazzled to look down and see the Acropolis struck by one beam of the setting sun, as if posing for a picture.

When I lived summers at my grandparents' farm, haying with my grandfather from 1938 to 1945, my dear grandmother Kate cooked abominably. For noon dinners, we might eat three days of fricasseed chicken from a setting hen that had boiled twelve hours.

I live in the house my great-grandfather moved to in 1865... I spent all my summers here as a kid haying with my grandfather, and it was my favorite place in the world.

I feed on other people's creativity, photographers, artists of every kind. Sometimes a feeling that you get listening to a song can be so powerful. I've wanted to write whole scripts around what I felt just listening to a piece of music. I think music is important, and surrounding your visual field with stimulating things.

I never played Freddy as real. In the true bible of Wes Craven's outline for the films, Freddy only manifests himself in dreams. And a lot goes into a dream, not the least of which is imagination. So Freddy is secondhand information. Freddy is an urban legend that's been handed down to these teenagers over the years.

I went down the creative path in my teen years, and when I was in high school, in my junior year, I would perform at this program that was very similar to 'School of Rock.' That was when I started writing and realized that's what I wanted to do.

My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.