I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

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're worried I'll bite, I promise to tell you first.

With my own music, I try to get away from things that are familiar and things that would be easy for me to go to.

Only the self-sufficient stand alone - most people follow the crowd and imitate.

I've been to the Titanic in a yellow submarine and the North Pole in a Russian nuclear ice breaker.

Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain.

When I work out, I feel happy, confident, and accomplished.

I'm seeing people float further and further away from the idea and the culture that we tried to create, and it really pisses me off.

The fear for a network is the viewer gets tired of you. Not that you lost any credibility, but they get tired of you.

In the long arc of time, you are only relevant if customers love you.

I've never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.