I don't like the climate in which writers have to work in the USA and I think it's my responsibility to talk about it.

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.

When you're dealing with a symbol in a realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audience's mind to work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But we're trained so much in pure, realistic theater that it's difficult for us to handle things on two levels at the same time.

The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.

Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.