Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

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.

There is no greater force for change than people inspired to live a better life.

A passionate person says “over my dead body, I will never give up” and you ask him why, he answers “because I have found something not only to live on, but something to die for”!

I can't die until the government finds a safe place to bury my liver

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it, on the inside.

The married should not forget that to speak of love begets love.

We have ... dreamed so much and observed so little, that our imaginations have grown larger than the world we live in, and our judgments have dwindled down to a point.

The more senses recruited at the moment of learning, the more likely you are to recall it later.

When you're a little weird, you aspire to be normal; when you're very weird, you aspire to be recognized for it.

Nature...cannot be fooled!

Fire beats roses again.