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

People are more easily manipulated when they don't have information. If you ensure that kids grow up without basic reading skills, math skills, and so forth, then you ensure that they can't act effectively.

I think that everybody who writes believes that their work has some kind of use-value, for someone, that there's some need for it, some person or group of people out there has demanded that these words come into being. I think that you do the work for these people. You hope that you can make a living at it. Whatever your ambitions and needs are in that regard, your only real requirement is to try and dig as deeply as you can dig to make sense of the meaning of human existence.

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.

In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.

There are two strains, I think, in American playwriting, of importance. One is traditional narrative realism, which is definitely my strain, and then the other great contribution is American musical theater, which is a whole other kettle of fish.

My whole life has conspired to bring me to this place, and I can’t despise my whole life.