When I was a kid and I'd be in trouble. I'd ask God to help me, and then once the fire was out, I wouldn't talk to Him anymore. When I got older, I began to find I needed some help spiritually, just to function.
— Stephen Adly Guirgis
I was raised a Catholic, so I can even feel a little, you know, embarrassed or guilty if I'm really offending people's sensibilities. To a degree.
One way to make a positive out of a negative is that you can put it into your work.
September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.
I'm not like a champion of profanity. I write what I hear, and the characters that I write, that's how they talk. That's how I talk a lot of the time. So I'm not trying to advance a social cause.
The good thing is that life is sometimes a work in progress.
I've lived my entire life in New York, and it informs everything.
I've lived with women, loved women, lost women. They've loved me, lost me, whatever.
I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.