I don't understand why I'm not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die

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.

Just live well. Just live

Gee, I am a complete Luddite when it comes to computers, I can barely log on!

There are some people who physically are not beautiful. But the way they are, the way they treat people, they become beautiful, and you forget all about [their looks].

People that want to control words will never ever try to break up, like, a fight on a subway. They will never confront an aggressive person on the bus. They prefer their fights to be easy.

Holiness is happiness; and the more you have of the former, the more you will undoubtedly enjoy of the latter.

But the idea that women can't take care of themselves still permeates our culture.

Language always preserves a play or figure/ground relation between experience, and perception and its replay in expression.

When someone tells you the fundamentals you think that everything's going to come out and be amazing.

I hate junk food. It depresses me.

I could be joking and smiling [with infidels] and then cutting their throats in the next second.