I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life. Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.

Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we've substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there's one and only one structure.

I see, in women friends, a really dangerous phenomenon where it seems they reach a certain age and become invisible.

In America I think it's much more full of disruption culturally; it's much more mysterious how we inherit culture here. We grab it where we can find it - we're insatiable - and there can be a sense here that it's not available to you as readily as it is in other cultures.

A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day.

Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important.

Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence?