At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.

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.

I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.

Success is always something that you have to recover from.

Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.

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.'

In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.