Within a year after I write a play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldn't revise or rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, I'm so involved with the experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I can't see what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find is at the moment of critical heat - of self-critical heat when I'm actually writing.

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

Everybody wants to go see the big hit [at the theatre]. Not because it's any good. Because it's the big hit and everybody wants to be able to talk about the big hit.

If you intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can evaporate and vanish. It's not only terribly difficult to talk about, it's also dangerous.

Every monster was a man first.

If I've been accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are ambivalent, indeed, that's the way I find life.