Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Writers always sound insufferably smug when they sit back and assert that their job is only to ask questions and not to answer them. But, in good part, it is true. And once you become committed to one particular answer, your freedom to ask new questions is seriously impaired.

You cant get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.