The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.

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.

I am sorry my decisions do not meet with your approval, but nevertheless, they are mine, and the consequences are also mine.

A diet should be named after what you do eat, not what you don't eat.

Upon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides

I think the Pistons have such a well rounded team, which is why they're so successful. All you have to do is look at the stats defensively and at their rebounding and scoring.

I like the Western genre, I think it's uniquely American.

Let a hundred flowers bloom.

John Waters is one of the sweetest, dearest, most adorable men I've ever worked with.

There's no right or wrong just truthful or untruthful.

When you're a student and you just want some money to feel like you're an adult, you'll pretty much do anything within reason.

That is how His Majesty [the Lord] rewards our good works---I mean, by predisposing us to perform better ones.