The purpose of technique is to free the unconscious. If you follow the rules ploddingly, they will allow your unconscious to be free.

President Obama seems to understand the Constitution as a 'set of suggestions.'

My definition of a 'friend' is, coming from Chicago, someone who says, 'Yeah, sure. You know what? Let's talk about what we can talk about. Let's help each other out. Your politics are none of my business.'

They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one.

If you're neurotic and you think, I'm not where I deserve to be or my mother didn't love me, or blah, blah, blah, that lie, that neurotic vision, takes over your life and you're plagued by it 'til it's cleansed. In a play, at the end of the play, the lie is revealed. [T]he better the play is, the more surprising and inevitable the lie is, as Aristotle told us. Plays are about lies.

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

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'