What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

Understand--it ALWAYS makes sense. Sense can't be avoided. If it first seems to be non-sense, wait: roots will reveal themselves.

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits.

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that.

Everything Brecht wrote—plays, dialogues, and poetry—was his attempt to clarify the inner contradictions not only of the capitalism and fascism of his times, but also of the communism that was always disappointing his deepest hopes. In a book that makes Brecht’s struggle to reveal these hidden contradictions its central theme, Glahn issues, by implication, a call to arms to today’s artists—who are faced with a world that seems to defy attempts to treat the global crisis with an art that is rarely more than notes on ‘local’ angst.