Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

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.

Empathy is the highest qualification one can obtain in order to genuinely love.

Those who think fate is against them have already crucified themselves. They have already decided what fate should do with them

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

Everybody, even me, sometimes had to compromise on something, doing things we know to be wrong, and this happens doing whatever job in the world. But a singer must have the courage of saying no.

As time goes on, thing do get made up.

My father's religious life was not Biblically centered. He was a saintly man, whom I could never emulate, so I went into scholarship rather than into the kind of pastoral activity that he pursued.

People who own everything know how to relax a little and bend and exhale once in a while, but they're not going to let it get out of control.

(...) You cruel creature, little mite of a thing with a heart the size of a fullstop.

I loved being pregnant. I felt unapologetically curvy, sexy, and intensely feminine. After giving birth I joined the ranks of millions of new mothers when I moaned, 'Why do I still look pregnant?'

The GAA is the sporting wing of the IRA.