Playwright

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of...