Burroughs's voice is hard, derisive, inventive, free, funny, serious, poetic, indelibly American.

Once in a while there were things in screenwriting that taught me things for fiction. But there's nothing in screenwriting that teaches you anything for the theater. I'm not sure I've ever fully appreciated before how different a form theater is.

I don't know what I think until I write it down.

Discovery still happens in the writing. You start in nonfiction with a whole lot more going for you, because all the discovery isn't waiting to be made. You've made some of it in the research. As you get deeper into a piece and do more research, the notes are in the direction of the piece - you're actually writing it.

Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States.

Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.