The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

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.

And to 'scape stormy days, I choose an everlasting night.

When the sky is fully covered by the birds, you will feel the winds of pure freedom beneath this sky!

No one knows your inner battle. No one knows the challenge you face. No one knows the sacrifice it takes to do what you do. But you're not alone.

To the world, you are America.

Of course we are coming to invest in Germany - that is certain. Most airplanes in the fleet of Qatar Airways are from Airbus.

Soup is to the meal, what the hostesses smile of welcome is to the party. A prelude to the goodness to come.

I do travel a lot, because I need oxygen, I need to go to places to meet people who aren't upset at me because I'm asking for peace.

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

Trying to describe my life and feelings to you is like trying to describe coulours to the blind, or music to the deaf. It's simply not possible.

The purity of youth will usher in the Divine Wind.