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.
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?!
A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.
What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.
A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
I don’t like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.
The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.
Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process – it is, after all, black magic.
I write to find out what I’m talking about.
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.
If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?
That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.
The government is far more interested in taking, in regulated taking, than in promoting spontaneous generosity.
Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end.
In a democracy you cannot stop public access to that art that will most misinform the people. You cannot stop people from being misinformed. But what you can do is to educate the people to the point that they will throw the rascals out.
I don’t think I’ve ever written about me. I’m not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.
Anything you put in a play – any speech – has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.
I think that’s foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don’t know anything about themselves.
School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians.