“You want the tension to escalate. Keeping them there is the hardest part, so you have to take away any excuse for them to leave.”

I think there is a complicated side effect to overcoming evil in that we are forever changed by it.

I show up on time, I am very rigorous about scheduling, and I am very focused.

What I’ve learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn’t matter.

I try not to write more than two or three, I try to just write one if possible

I think after we ingest some of the cruelty of the world, it takes years off of our lives, but it also gives us wisdom and a little grace, hopefully a sense of compassion.

Sometimes when I’m directing, the stage manager will have a good idea and that’s okay with me.

The same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn’t a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they’re not in the sky

I don’t like it when it’s consumer advocacy, like how you should spend your $60. Great criticism is a kind of literature.

It just happens quicker and faster now.

If I tried to write that it would just be false. Or I’d have someone enter with a machine gun.

Snow settles in the liver. The bowels grow thick with humidity.

I feel that I’d rather know an actors’ work, or have an instinct about them and sit down and have coffee with them, or I’ll see them in something and I’ll see if I can get along with them in some way, shape, or form.

I’ve never really felt good at the parties, but I have enough friends now that I feel social, I used to feel very antisocial, but I think the theater helps.

I think I’m a little more daunted by when the machinery of the play is really huge.

I know that they want certain things and they’re in a certain room and they smell like this and they look like that.

In Kosovo, the U.S. has chosen a course of action that escalates atrocities and violence.

How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?

A war of words escalated between the president-elect and a civil rights icon.

Most people try to escalate a relationship too quickly.