I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?

New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion.

Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.

If you want to understand what you're thinking, you kind of have to work it through and write it. And the only way to work it through, for me, is to write it.

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 was relying on a kind of natural transition - the transitions made by someone who is slightly deranged.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.