The computer, the noise of the computer feels like impatience. It's sort of the sound of impatience to me.

Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?

When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

I just wondered what a thing it would be...if overnight everything you owe anything to, justice, or love, had really gone away. Free. It would be...heartless terror. Yes. Terrible, and... Very great. To shed your skin, every old skin, one by one and then walk away, unemcumbered, into the morning.

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.

A play should have barely been rescued from the mess it might just as easily have been.