If you [c]annot find your [h]eart's desire in your own backyard, you never lost it to begin with

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.

If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.

They say everything you go through in your childhood builds character and inner strength.

Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood - we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.

Only by pairing knowledge with inspiration will art evolve. Without these conditions any musician will remain a flawed artist, if one may speak of an artist at all.

Our task is tough, and our time is limited. Party organizations and governments at all levels must give priority to emission reduction and bring the idea deep into people's hearts.

From where can your authority and license as a parent come from, when you who are old, do worse things?

It's great to have other people's help. Then the music gets heard. There's a lot more commercial support for that now.

Grace is free only because the giver himself has borne the cost.

The Mother of Sorrows is my confidante, my teacher, my counselor, and my powerful advocate.

When a felon s not engaged in his employment, Or maturing his felonious little plans, His capacity for innocent enjoyment Is just as great as any honest mans.