When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don't put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.

Every monster was a man first.

Art has an obligation to offend

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

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.