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I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors.

When I read 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was so struck by the universality of small towns.

Reared in rural southern Alabama, we enjoyed an idyllic Huck Finn boyhood. But education there was casual at best. Our mother and father were high school teachers and challenged the pervasive easy-going ignorance.

Like every child growing up in America, I read 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn.' I liked them well enough, but I didn't love them.

Since 'Huckleberry Finn,' or thereabouts, it seemed that all American literature was about the alienated hero.

Noting that Huckleberry Finn was originally both valued and reviled because it shows the reader that the accepted moral code and social hierarchy is not always correct.

At one point, I was seriously considering playing Huck Finn in a production in Northern Maine in the dead of winter.

I've lived, laughed, lost, and loved again the whole Shakespearian thing.

I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'