A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'

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.

What you cant forget... God cant remember!

Look― shoot all you want. With a camera you can barely capture a soul at a time. With planned obsolescence, you can terminate everyone's future at once and they'll never know what hit them.

He who shares the danger ought to share the prize.

I'm pretty much a workaholic, but when you're doing what you love it's hard to think of a reason to stop.

The Mediterranean will be turned into an Italian lake.

I'm surprised I still have so much hair after all the things I've done with it.

As scary as change can be and as much as I might resist it, there's always some unkown gift that comes out of it. I really never thought you could begin again. You can.

I'm not a video game guy. I would rather throw around a football.

I don't object to nine aces in one deck. But when a man lays down five aces in one hand... and besides, I know what I dealt him!

Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.