The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

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

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.

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

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.