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The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

I think the purpose of the writer is to help us see. The writer is someone who can perhaps have the joy of helping others see.

The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.

I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

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.

An author's characters do what he wants them to do.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity.

The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them.