In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

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.

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.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.

I left Xerox for the non-profit sector because it was clear to me that only public/private partnerships can pull off a turnaround plan at the scale we need to tackle global poverty.

You know what Oscar Wilde said, ma'am? He said, "nothing that is worth knowing can be taught". Nothing personal, ma'am... Carry on.

Badly off as the men...were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.

Swift doth young Love flee, And we stand wakened, shivering from our dream.

For what we engage, we transform. And what we engage with our hearts is transformed forever.

A man who for an entire week does nothing but hit himself over the head has little reason to be proud.

Right before the explosions begin, I find a star.

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

Economic planning is nothing more than the forcible superseding of other people's plans by the powerful elite backed up by the brute force of government.