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

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

When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.

Each culture has its own form of staged combat, evolved from its particular method of street fighting and cleaned up for presentation as a spectacle, e.g. savate, Cornish wrestling, karate, kung-fu.

It is to a dramatist, which is to say, to an unfrocked psychoanalyst, stunning that that which has sustained the Left in my generation, its avatar, its prime issue, has been abortion. For, whether or not it is regarded as a woman's right, an unfortunate necessity, or murder, which is to say, irrespective of differing and legitimate political views, to enshrine it as the most important test of the Liberal, is, mythologically, an assertion to the ultimate right of a postreligious Paganism.

I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.

The pain of losing is diverting. So is the thrill of winning. Winning, however, is lonelier, as those you've won money from are not likely to commiserate with you. Winning takes getting used to.