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.
A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.
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.
Love is the world’s infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.
There’s a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.
Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions.
A play is never finished. You’ll find out how much I mean that when you read my Last Will and Testament.
I don’t understand why I’m not dead. When your heart breaks, you should die.
Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.
One has to have a complicated kind of optimism. You can’t refuse to look at how horrible things are.
It isn’t easy, it doesn’t count if it’s easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness. Which is maybe where love and justice finally meet.
I’ve always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.
Theater really gets damaged when there is a paucity of good criticism around.
It’s the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do.
Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?
I’m not religious, but I like God and he likes me.
I don’t know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.