You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

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 power without compassion is the worst kind of evil there is.

Some people are lucky to find love, others must settle with being liked...

You don't need to kill with a sword, the tongue can do equally a better job and police will not knock on your door

You've got to know thyself, date thyself and most importantly be thyself.

Adventure is really always just subjecting yourself to something unfamiliar

Have a short memory and a lot of forgiveness. Especially us girls who don't forget a thing. Move on.

We may as well cut out group theory. That is a subject that will never be of any use in physics.

I've had no sexual education, but I have six children.

Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.

Well, I do lie for a living. I'm an actor.