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.

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.

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you're a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you're older. It's that when you're a kid you use the cards as a substitute for a real experience, and when you're older you use real experience as a substitute for the fantasy.

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.

I know playwrights who like to kid themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that the play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But there's work to be done - and discovery to be made.

Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

I think we should all live on the precipe of life, as fully and as dangerously as possible. Everyone should make the assumption that they're going through life only once. Tomorrow we die. Why not take chances, extend yourself? How awful it is when a person comes to the end of life full of regret.