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.

I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.

Creativity is magic. Don't examine it too closely.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.

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.

The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.