Every writer's got to pay some attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of what the audience feels about his work.

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a Hollywood phrase, "what they can live with," and more on an examination of the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view.

In rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality that's occurring on stage that by the time the play has opened I'm not usually quite as aware of the distinctions between what I'd intended and the result. There are many ways of getting the same result.

I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.