My sense of reality and logic is different from most people's.

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.

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

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.

Curiously enough, the only two plays that I've done very much revision on were the two adaptations - even though the shape of them was pretty much determined by the original work. With my own plays, the only changes, aside from taking a speech out here, putting one in there (if I thought I dwelled on a point a little too long or didn't make it explicit enough), are very minor; but even though they're very minor - having to do with the inability of actors or the unwillingness of the director to go along with me - I've always regretted them.

If you want a commercial success - it's the confusion of commerce with art. A successful play is not considered to be the best written. It is the one that sells the most tickets. Those standards are destructive [to theatre].

As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.