If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can evaporate and vanish. It's not only terribly difficult to talk about, it's also dangerous.

If you examine the history of any playwright of the past twenty - five or thirty years - I'm not talking about the comedy boys, I'm talking about the more serious writers - it seems inevitable that almost every one has been encouraged until the critics feel that they have built them up beyond the point where they can control them; then it's time to knock them down again.

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.

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

I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

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.

I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half before I sit down to write it out.