New York is not Mecca. It just smells like it.

He's too nervous to kill himself. He wears his seat belt in a drive-in movie.

[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place.

Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it.

I never write a play with an eye to film.

Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun. . . . In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.