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.

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.

A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.

Love opens your heart, trumps fear, and paves the way for healing in all aspects of your life.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

Whoever risks, shall know how far they can reach.

No such word as can't. No such word as babagoozle neither!

I used to read only fiction. Now I don't read much, only occasionally, such as a Cormac McCarthy or a Jim Harrison novel.

I usually tame my off-kilter sense of humor for novels.

I'm tired and I'm sick to death of being without you.

I can't seem to be a pessimist long enough to overlook the possibility of things being overwhelmingly good.

To reject practice by saying, 'it is conceptual!' is the path of fools. A tendency of the inexperienced and something to be avoided.

It is true that I once refused to eat haggis in Scotland and this did not sit well with the local population.