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There are some who speak well and write badly. For the place and the audience warm them, and draw from their minds more than they think of without that warmth.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.

What's exciting about theatre is observing human behaviour. You're constantly making judgments about body language, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual.

I come from a tradition where the writer writes a play for the actors, rather than for himself, and the dialogue is made to work onstage, so it needs actors to help shape it. So you never get a play right straightaway.

Our job as actors is to just try to be as accurate and as mindful of what the audience is going through and receiving and processing.

I've seen plays that are, objectively, total messes that move me in ways that their tidier brethren do not. That's the romantic mystery of great theater. Translating this ineffability into printable prose is a challenge that can never be fully met.