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.

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.

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.

If life is fast, live faster.

I am not here to parade my religious sentiments, but I declare I have too much respect for the faith in which I was born to ever use it as the basis of a political organization.

I've been boxing ever since I was 16. I love surprising people who think a short, blond girl can't fight! Just because I look a certain way doesn't mean I'm weak.

I've been paying alimony since I was 14 and child support since 15. That's a joke, but not by much

Is man God's biggest blunder, or is man's God?

There is no disgrace in honest failure; there is disgrace in fearing to fail

Where I grew up has had a huge influence on me. It's a place where there aren't many people and there's lots of sky.

A stomach without bread and a purse without gold have led to so many revolutions in history.

[on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room] Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.