I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

I work best after the deadline has passed, when I'm in a panic.

Love is the world's infinite mutability; lies, hatred, murder even, are all knit up in it; it is the inevitable blossoming of its opposites, a magnificent rose smelling faintly of blood.

I'm not an experimental artist. I have no talent for that. I need a certain kind of antecedent form to follow.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty, how many ghastly, mortifying missteps, how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment, how partial all accomplishment is, how incomplete?

One of the things I learned in 'Slavs!' is that it's much easier to talk about being gay than it is to talk about being a socialist. People are afraid of socialism, and plays that deal with economics are scarier to them.