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.

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

No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen...You shouldn't have a baby if there's no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.

The most amazing thing to me about the sea is the tide. A harbour like St. Ives is totally transformed in a very short space of time by the arrival or departure of the sea.

Gerry Lopez was a famous surfer back then and his board had a lightning bolt in the in the middle, so my Dad made me a surf/skateboard with a lightning bolt on it.

There are five billion people living on this planet. But you fall in love with one particular person, and you won't swap her for any other.

Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly.

The true science of martial arts means practicing them in such a way that they will be useful at any time, and to teach them in such a way that they will be useful in all things.

The eyes of a young girl can tell everything. And I always look in their eyes. There I can see if I will have a champion.

The children break all my jewelry, so everything I wear is cheap - from Topshop or Dorothy Perkins.

It is hard to compare the eras, but Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb from the past, Sandy Koufax and Roger Clements from the present.

You are never stronger...than when you land on the other side of despair.