Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.

I don't direct the plays of others.

I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

You simply can't make someone love you if they don't. You must choose someone who already loves you. If you choose someone who does not love you, this is the sort of love you must want.

I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.

Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

If you prepare, and you've got wonderful, bright people who get it, who accept and appreciate your preparation, then you don't have to explain yourself 9,000 times.