Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

All reviews should carry a Surgeon General's warning. The good ones turn your head, the bad ones break your heart.

Fear, " the doctor said, "is the relinquishment of logic, the willing relinquishing of reasonable patterns. We yield to it or we fight it, but we cannot meet it halfway.

You want a great life? Well, greatness is on the other side of that f***ing wall... don't just go over it, go through it! What are you waiting for?

With people of only moderate ability modesty is mere honesty but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

I want to be anonymous . . . my ambition is to be completely forgotten.

We need to break our dependency on foreign sources of oil, which leaves us at the mercy of foreign powers. To do that, we should increase domestic energy production.

A society is a group whose members have more relationships with one another then they do with outsiders.

I definitely enjoy an audience, when I'm performing. As I get older I'm kind of less comfortable at being demonstrative. I always fancied myself as a raconteur, but that never really worked out.

We are very influenced by completely automatic things that we have no control over, and we don't know we're doing it.

Every five, six, seven, eight, 10 years I do a raisonné. When it's printed in the book, it's finished.

If it's a language you don't understand and you're not concerned with the meanings of the words, your impression comes from how the words look, particularly if the language uses different characters.