You can't kind of take away, you either do or you don't. If you kind of take away something you're a failure.

Every play is so important. It's a record of what life was like at the time you wrote that play or that book.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

The power of the past to still dominate our thinking today.

You cannot write to resonate twenty or thirty or forty years from now. You only can write for that very day, but whatever happens is all gravy.

You can't be a sort of pioneer.

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth.