It isn't easy, it doesn't count if it's easy, it's the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.

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 want to write, just write anything that comes into your mind. You will be surprised at how you can force inspiration to stand on your side.

Although God believers don't need evolution to be false, atheists need evolution to be true.

There are people who lie simply for the sake of lying.

I guess I'm like any other concerned father, except that nobody else's son guns a cycle over 17 pickups without holding on to the handlebars.

The American Way is an amalgam of our compassion, our strengths, our failings and our attempts to build a better world, a more perfect union.

I'd always maintained an image so that people wouldn't approach me.

It's very easy to accept and love those who are like us, but to love someone different is very hard

The technology is already incredible and will improve massively in the next few years. Think about what you could do.

One of the most interesting things in the world to me is the vast difference between what people say they are going to do, and what they actually do.

Each night a child is born is a holy night.