I am a Doctor. A.B... M.A... PH.D... ABMAPHID! Abmaphid has been variously described as a wasting disease of the frontal lobes, and as a wonder drug. It is actually both.

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

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

Writing has got to be an act of discovery....I write to find out what I'm thinking about.

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

I find that in the course of the day when I'm writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache, and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and self-critical, is so intense that I've got to stop doing it.