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For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

I've always known that writing plays is very difficult, because I've written three or four that have never been produced.

Other people can write grown-up, political plays about the troubles in the world. My plays deal with magic and hope.

Give me good writing, and I'll play it all day.

The play is a marvelous form, but it demands less than a novel.

It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.