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.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

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.

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don't know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

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.