A play is never finished. You'll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament.

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.

Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

If you truly believe in something that is totally rejected by others, then you've just made a difference.

As far as songwriting, my inspirations came from love, life and death, and viewing other people's situations.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Election made me more aware, more conscious, more sensitive. Not just of sexism but of discrimination in all areas - class, gender, race. I had realized that there were problems .

God and eternal things are my only pleasure.

I am getting much more political as I get older. It's the duty of any writer, in particular, not to stand back from the world.

Within tears, find hidden laughter Seek treasures amid ruins, sincere one.

There were exceptions, a couple of families that just plain didn't want to even think about it, although forty years had passed but mostly the people were very interested in talking about it.

Spinnin' a rope is fun if your neck ain't in it

You really just have to have a good attitude, challenge yourself, and you can accomplish great things.