I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.

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.

The ultimate purpose of education is to learn how to find and see the beauty of creation so that you may feel the joy of life.

None can love freedom heartily but good men - the rest love not freedom but licence.

Forget the floor plans. Arrange the furniture where it is the most comfortable and will look best.

Everybody agrees that a future in which you are dead is a very bad thing, and that it isn't made any better by your not being around to notice how bad it is.

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

My mother and I, our favorite part of any baked pasta is the top, where the cheese gets crusty.

If everybody walks into the room wearing crutches you don't know who can stand on their own two feet.

I'd stop anyone from taking that smile from you. I would, if I were allowed.

Without involvement, there is no commitment. Mark it down, asterisk it, circle it, underline it. No involvement, no commitment.

In life there is not time to grieve long.