Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work.

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.

Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it.

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.

The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.