Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

She gave herself a hard twist and fell into a sitting position, staring at me with those maggot-filled doll’s eyes.

Mothers are all slightly insane.

A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

Drawing is the simplest way of establishing a picture vocabulary because it is an instant, personal declaration of what is important and what is not.

There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.

Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.

As a great master once observed: "There are two methods of becoming god, the upright or the averse." Let the mind become as a flame or a pool of still water.

In the beginning, when I was trying to write, I couldnt turn off the outside world to the extent that I can now.

I had never been to Hawaii, and now I say that my body is from L.A. but my heart is from Hawaii, because I'm in love with it and it's home on every level, from a spiritual, soulful place.

The big issue of our time is trying to deal with extremism based on a perversion of religion and how you get peaceful coexistence between people of different faiths and cultures.