The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.

I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.

I don't really have a system or set of principles. It's kind of common sense mixed up with instinct.

I doubt that art needed Ruskin any more than a moving train needs one of its passengers to shove it.

Words... They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.