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.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

Naturally, no writer who's any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was writing about.

I said I was impressed, Martha. I'm beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?

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?

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.

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.