God knows I've had productions where there were actors in my plays who were making more money per week than I was.

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.

Men are so easy to manipulate, poor things.

Suicide isn't something people do to hurt other people. It's something people do to release themselves from pain.

Compassionate people are geniuses in the art of living, more necessary to the dignity, security, and joy of humanity than the discoverers of knowledge.

Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies.

I've never understood people that sleep around. I think there's something very lacking in your life when you do, not to be judgmental.

Nothing is more deadly than a deserted, waiting street.

The whole of Paris is a vast university of Art, Literature and Music... it is worth anyone's while to dally here for years. Paris is a seminar, a post-graduate course in everything.

I'm 18 so I'm still young and I'm still learning. But I mean, relationships in general are hard.

In the best fiction, the language itself can become almost invisible.

Not only is the world informed of everything about you, but of a great deal more.