Mama, I know you used to ride the bus. Riding the bus, and it’s hot and bumpy and crowded and too noisy, and more than anything else in the world, you wanna get off. And the only reason in the world you don’t get off is it’s still fifty blocks from where you’re going. Well, I can get off right now if I want to. Because even if I ride fifty more years and get off then, it’s still the same place when I step down to it. Whenever I feel like it, I can get off. Whenever I’ve had enough, it’s my stop. I’ve had enough.

on the whole the American theater, dominated by men, does not perceive women fighting for their lives as a central issue.

There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.

When you fight something long enough, it becomes a center pole right in your life and you count on it to be there to fight with.

Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as ''night, Mother.'