Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.

My greatest fear is that the audience will beat me to the punch line.

Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

In a world we find terrifying, we ratify that which doesn't threaten us.

Listen, here's the thing about an English degree - if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.