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There is an audience for every play; it's just that sometimes it can't wait long enough to find it.

People say, 'How can you stay in a play for a long time?' I say, 'The audience is never the same.'

A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal.

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.

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.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

Even if the play is great, every day in theatre you have to question everything because the audience is new every day. I love that.

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.

Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'

The play is always fresh to me. It's not the audience's fault that I've said the words before.