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.

One bulls-eye and you're rich and famous. The rich get more famous and the famous get rich. You're the talk of the town....The sense of so much depending on success is very hard to ignore, perhaps impossible. It leads to disproportionate anxiety and disproportionate relief or disappointment.

Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, "Oh, for God's sake, shut up."

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

A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.

I've lost all capacity for disbelief. I'm not sure that I could even rise to a little gentle scepticism.

Uncertainty is the normal state.