I could give you absolutely sterling advice on how to avoid writing, how when you run out of things to do other than going to your desk and writing, when every closet is reorganized and you've called your oldest living relative twice in one day to see what she's up to and there isn't an unanswered e-mail left on your computer or you simply can't bear to answer another one and there is no dignity, not a drop left, in any further evasion of the task at hand, namely writing, well, you can always ask your dentist for a root canal or have an accident in the bathtub instead.

I don't think you have to earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, then art is what you do, whether or not you're paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation.

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one. And I bless you: More Life. The Great Work Begins.

I certainly wake up every morning and thank God that I'm not a novelist because the theater is tough, but novel writing is infinitely harder. Especially with the economics of serious fiction being what they are in America.

I love reading; it's a great way to avoid writing.

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.