Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.

I write to find out what I'm talking about.

A writer is a controlled schizophrenic.

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.

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.

When one controls form, one doesn't do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.