Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.

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.

Fortunately, we did most of our athletic stuff inside, so we didn't have to jog through Tribeca looking like a bunch of boot-camp hippie children.

The sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one.

There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

I like my peace and quiet whenever I can grab it.

I don't just come from a musical family, but from a musical community.

There is a large stock on hand; but somehow or other, nobody's experience ever suits us but our own.

Troubles never come singly.

Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.

Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly "eaten up" by the Fashion being heralded.

When I made my first album, there was no indication that anybody other than my parents were going to buy it.