I ended up becoming a playwright because you can be grammatically incorrect: people speaking in bad poetry or people attempting to speak well and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. The whole imperfection of it suddenly felt freeing to me.

I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

For me, being a good creative writing teacher is actually kind of being a good therapist. The line is very porous - you can also be a creepy guru/abusive therapist, too, so you have to be very careful. But it feels really important to me.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I never had a lot of ideas. I always have exactly one that is the next project; the idea of a project beyond that project is ludicrous.

If anything, I was the opposite of most college students who think they can do anything.