“Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.”

People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them ‘all of my life.’

I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I’m tired.I’m tired of the truth and I’m tired of lying about the truth.

A lot of people are confused by “hello.” A lot of people are confused by a lot of things they shouldn’t be confused by.

I don’t like symbolism that hits you over the head. A symbol should not be a cymbal.

There is chaos behind the civility, of course.

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.

There are always going to be more actors than anybody can ever use.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.

You’re alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?

If you have no wounds, how can you know if you’re alive?

When people don’t like the way a play ends, they’re likely to blame the play.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just kill him.

The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

My uncle was a preacher, and I used to go watch him preach. He was also funny, so I’m very ‘preacher-ish’ on stage, not by intent but because that’s where I learned to talk in front of people.

You can tell on-stage when a joke’s starting to lose its pop. It doesn’t mean people don’t want to hear it anymore; it means I don’t want to do it anymore. Because I want to move on to something that has a knee-jerk reaction just like you get when you tell somebody a joke that they’ve never heard.

You can teach somebody how to be a brain surgeon, but you cannot teach them how to walk on a stage and make people laugh.

People, when they go on stage, tend to be animated and try to force things out instead of relaxing and bringing it in.

We come altogether fresh and raw into the several stages of life, and often find ourselves without experience, despite our years.

Remember that as a teenager you are in the last stage of your life when you will be happy to hear the phone is for you.

As a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

So there are more songs on the stage because the songs are kind of the close up.