I have kind of an almost religious feeling about poets. I usually refuse to meet them because I admire them so much. Except for Poe.

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.

In a world full of lions and tigers entertaining the masses, have you ever seen a wolf performing in a circus?

In America, anybody can be president.That's one of the risks you take.

Trying to figure out God is like trying to catch a fish in the Pacific Ocean with an inch of dental floss.

...True prayer is measured by weight, not by length. A single groan before God may have more fullness of prayer in it than a fine oration of great length.

21 Jump Street is great. I just made that, and produced it and was a writer on it. It's starring myself and Channing Tatum, and maybe some surprise guests.

It's like eight thousand birds, Charles! Charles! Isn't it like eight thousand birds?

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

Just it's as close to magic as you can get in America, education.

I do have that personality where I like to have fun and enjoy life, so I have to make sure I tone myself down when I'm expressing myself.

I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot.