As a novelist, you deepen your characters as you go, adding layers. As a reporter, you try to peel layers away: observing subjects enough to get beneath the surface, re-questioning a source to find the facts. But these processes aren't so different.
Outside of the Constitution we have no legal authority more than private citizens, and within it we have only so much as that instrument gives us. This broad principle limits all our functions and applies to all subjects.
If you look at my career... I couldn't possibly have chosen those subjects if I was thinking, 'That's a great commercial idea.' I'm not aware of a great musical where someone has done that.
I don't pick subjects as much as they pick me.
We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.
Love every role to be new, and I always like to bring a freshness to every character I play, but that comes down to the script. So, it's important that it's a good script with good, truthful characters and truthful subjects.
What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime - terror.
Because I was extremely uncomfortable talking about sex with him at all and particularly in such a graphic way, I told him that I did not want to talk about these subjects.
I was interested in a lot of subjects from very early on. And that's uniquely Chicano because every Chicano I knew always had three jobs.
I think the value in books like mine, and a great number by other talented writers, is in the ability to bring dark subjects into the open where they are not so dark, where they can be talked about and considered by teens and adults alike.
