Art has an obligation to offend

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly. Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think I've got the rhythms wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in. One or two more things will happen, but not much.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

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.

There are two things that a playwright can have. Success or failure. I imagine there are dangers in both. Certainly the danger of being faced with indifference or hostility is discouraging, and it may be that success - acceptance if it's too quick, too lightning-quick - can turn the heads of some people.

Art has an obligation to offend