The way you give love is the most profoundly human part of you. When people say it's ugly or a perversion or an abomination, they're attacking the center of your being.

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.

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

The greater the pressure the brighter the diamond.

Trade it may help, society extend, But lures the Pirate, ant corrupts the friend: It raises armies in a nation's aid, But bribes a senate, and the land's betray'd.

Treat kindly every miserable truth that knocks begging at your door, otherwise you will some day fail to recognize Truth Himself when He comes in rags.

One thing I want to teach my son is sensitivity to other people. I want to teach him not to be this macho freak.

One of the paramount reasons for staying attractive is so you can have somebody to go to bed with.

What a mercy was it to us to have parents that prayed for us before they had us, as well as in our infancy when we could not pray for ourselves!

Help! The customer service representative doesn't understand my problem.

Supervision is an opportunity to bring someone back to their own mind, to show them how good they can be.

The separation of powers is about legislative powers. It isn't about discussion or words.