I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.

In an amusement park, you can go on a roller coaster that carries you up and down, or you can go on another kind of ride that whirls you around in a circle. Similarly, there are different sorts of entertaining experiences in the theater.

I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.

What I'm really involved in when I'm writing is something that no one ever mentions when they see any play. Writing is like trying to make gunpowder out of chemicals. You have these words and sentences and the strange meanings and associations that are attached to the words and sentences, and you're somehow cooking these things all up so that they suddenly explode and have a powerful effect. That's what absorbs me from day to day in writing a play.

I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.

I do things, and other people laugh at them. I rarely know what the joke is supposed to be or why they're laughing.

I started writing plays in around 1967, and at a certain point, I thought, 'I'm writing plays, I should learn about acting and what it is.' So I went to the HB Studio in New York, and I was there for about nine months.