As much as I hate his movies, Oliver Stone has an aspiration I admire, and that is that he wants his art to be part of what makes and changes public policy and cultural practice.

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.

You achieve greatness, not by accumulating wealth, but by becoming king, loving, forgiving, and simple.

Tender-handed stroke a nettle and it stings you for your pains Grasp it like a man of mettle and it soft as silk remains.

What I was saved to is much more important than what I was saved from.

Somebody did complain to me and tell me that my clothes were so loud they couldn't hear me sing.

She gave so many reasons that I've forgotten them all.

People's arrest tapes, mug shots, everything is online.

The great thing about The Clash of course is that they keep searching for answers beyond that.

If I could act in theater, my whole life, and never act in film or television again, and just direct the rest of my life, I would gladly do that.

Atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair was murdered. Jon Murray and Robin Murray-O'Hair were also murdered by individuals involved with the atheist organization.

I never yet did hear, That the bruis'd heart was pierced through the ear