There are certain early plays of mine that I really don't like, but I can't imagine going back and fixing them. I would be totally incapable of it. I'm not in the head of the characters anymore.

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.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

I feel like my life is at its happiest when I don't have a looming deadline. There's some really groovy wonderful times, when I'm like, "I have a new piece, I'm excited about it, I'm reading all these books about it, but there's not a lot of time pressure, and I'm financially stable enough right now that I don't have to be trying to get another job." But that's so rare.

I feel with writing, so much of the time, I don't know how to tap in and be spontaneous and alive on a daily basis. So I don't write every day. I'm just not disciplined, and I can't be in the groove most of the time. I feel like I'm in the groove ten days a year or something. But with reading and research, I feel like I have this incredibly instinctive pleasure-driven process that ends up working out for me and inspiring me. It's almost like a maze, like I know eventually I'll hit the heart of my play if I read enough books.

I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear.

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.