One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

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.

Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.

We create things to watch them grow, Ruin, she said. To take pleasure in seeing that which we love become more than it was before.

We hated each other so well and loved each other so badly...

You know, artists don't really have all that much experience of life. We make a huge amount out of the small experience that we do have.

The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

I am Jewish. My real name is Chris Tuckenberg. A lot of people don't know about that.

If 'Hamlet' had been written in these days it would probably have been called 'The Strange Affair at Elsinore.

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.

My body is here, but my mind has already teed off.

I've always thought the law ought to put on spectacles, it has mighty poor eyesight once in a while.