I'm a very boring person.
You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics?
He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.
If the audience is made to do not enough work, they resent it without knowing it. Too much and they get lost. There's a perfect pace to be found. And a perfect place that is different for every line of the play.
My mind gets into a verbal mode.
Underneath runs the main current of preoccupation, which is keeping one's nose clean at all times. This means that when things go wrong you have to pass the blame along the line, like pass-the-parcel, till the music stops.