All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don't want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don't think art should be escapist. That's a waste of time.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.