I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.

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.

I think I can say with confidence that it’s a lot funnier if you haven’t actually been attacked by a shark.

Dear Whoever-that-just-found-out-that-they-have-a-terminal-illness, don't let that put you down. Technically, we are all dying.

I think following my instinct has proven to lead me in the right direction, and it's hard to hear sometimes, because it's a noisy world and there's a lot of people talking to you.

The Glorious Virgin did not have a stain in her birth because she was santified in her mother's womb and safeguarded there by angels.

Everyday is a birthday; every moment of it is new to us; we are born again, renewed for fresh work and endeavor.

I would rather be erring on the side of common-sense pragmatism and doing everything possible so that I felt that no stone was left unturned in terms of trying to protect school children.

The only thing that's going to save you is that saving blood of Jesus Christ.

I don't think that my work appeals that much to the hard-core, avant-garde film audience. They appeal to people who teach film and those establishment figures on the East Coast.

Being a model seems like a dream job - lots of new clothes, cocaine, dates with Leonardo DiCaprio. But that's just for lady models.

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.