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I've done nothing with my life but write plays.

I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.

I took a writing class in college, liked it, and my first year out of school I couldn't get a job, so I wrote a play.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

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

I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.

In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.

I had always written. I had written stories and poems. Then I started writing plays.

Why should I write a play? I don't have to write a play, do I? But somehow, I think that's what I'm here for, so I'd better do it.

You know, essentially when you do a play you're reinterpreting a work of art that already exists. That's not what happens with a movie.