Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.

Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?"

My dad was an immigrant kid and a Democrat and a Jew, and we didn't know any Republicans in our group. So I grew up Democratic. My dad was a labor lawyer - a very hardworking guy, a one-horse labor lawyer - and then I went to hippie college and lived in the bubble.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

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

Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.

Every reiteration of the idea that _nothing matters_ debases the human spirit. Every reiteration of the idea that there is no drama in modern life, there is only dramatization, that there is no tragedy, there is only unexplained misfortune, debases us. It denies what we know to be true. In denying what we know, we are as a nation which cannot remember its dreams--like an unhappy person who cannot remember his dreams and so denies that he does dream, and denies that there are such things as dreams.