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

I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth.

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.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody's encouraged to want less, you'll end up with less.

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.

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.

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.