My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.

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 most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

Teaching is bringing the news.

Instantly, the pair fell to groping one other as if each had puff the magic dragon at a rock concert in Woodstock.

The Internet is complicated. Netiquette is simple. Be nice. NetworkEtiquette.net

It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.

I destroy the image after I've made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there.

As time goes by the memories of sitting on the edge of a bed and reading aloud with your kid are going to be very meaningful in your own mental scrapbook.

The storyboard department doesn't talk to the layout department, which doesn't talk to the writing department. They're all jealous of each other.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

I feel like the oldest person in the world with the longest stretch of life before me.