The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

Some things that make sense to me don't make the same degree of sense to other people.

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

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

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

The characters' lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you've killed them off.

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