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

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.

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

There are two things that a playwright can have. Success or failure. I imagine there are dangers in both. Certainly the danger of being faced with indifference or hostility is discouraging, and it may be that success - acceptance if it's too quick, too lightning-quick - can turn the heads of some people.

There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.