I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.

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.

Physical attractiveness is no indicator of an individual's beauty."from "The Beauty of Ugh

When I walk down the beach and smell the salt water, hear the waves crashing against the shoreline, and feel the granular sand under my feet, I can't help but realize why I'm here on this green earth

To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.

There will be time to diet when people stopped killing one another.

As an actor, and especially as a young woman, there's so much pressure to look good all the time and it really detracts from what our job really is about, which is portraying a different person.

The day is for honest men, the night for thieves.

It's really important for actors to feel that they're more than something for hire.

You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

If you want to have a lot of success, you need to have a lot of failure

I did learn Chinese kung-fu in a school for a short time, but I couldn't afford to pay for long-term learning.