A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains.

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.

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.

Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it's entertainment.

You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history.

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.

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.