You learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a critical mind if you're going to read it.

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.

With Christ as your partner, there is no such thing as failure, only results.

Successful minds work like a gimlet to a single point.

There is nothing of greater importance to the well-being of society at large - of man as well as woman - than the true proper position of woman.

Maybe more businesses should allow time for recess.

It is true that I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.

I thought, "If I can make you feel what it's like for that first super-passionate love, other people might like that too," and, of course, they did.

The wrong word is like a lie jammed inside the story.

I like movies about longing and desperation, and dark and light things, stories about people struggling to raise children, and to have relationships and be intimate with each other.

I don't really ever worry about what anyone else does and I certainly don't worry about what anyone else says about me.

What the fashion system says and what the fashion customer says are really two different things.