A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

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.

The hardest mistakes to learn from are those that lack consequence.

There were cracked head stones, dead flowers and weeds coming through the ground. Even the trees looked lifeless. --The Body By the Tree

Be in control of your life, don’t let circumstances come to control you.

After the game the king and pawn go into the same box.

If you're bored with life - you don't get up every morning with a burning desire to do things - you don't have enough goals.

Mark-to-market accounting is like crack. Don't do it.

The status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed.

[Jason Hale] is an upstanding guy. Yeah, I like him. He's good.

The tomato offers its gift of fiery color and cool completeness.

I don't think anything is unrealistic if you believe you can do it.