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.

I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the unconscious.

A rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the works he's been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become confused by this and they start doing imitations of what they've done before, or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.

Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with my usual modesty, that I was a writer.

Influence is a matter of selection - both acceptance and rejection.

I’m infinitely more involved in the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life.

When one controls form, one doesn't do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively.