I Have Been Both Overpraised And Underpraised.

The Characters' Lives Have Gone On Before The Moment You Chose To Have The Action Of The Play Begin. And Their Lives Are Going To Go On After You Have Lowered The Final Curtain On The Play, Unless You've Killed Them Off.

The Playwright, Along With Any Writer, Composer, Painter In This Society, Has Got To Have A Terribly Private View Of His Own Value, Of His Own Work. He's Got To Listen To His Own Voice Primarily. He's Got To Watch Out For Fads, For What Might Be Called The Critical Aesthetics.

When One Controls Form, One Doesn't Do It With A Stopwatch Or A Graph. One Does It By Sensing, Again Intuitively.

Each Time I Sit Down And Write A Play I Try To Dismiss From My Mind As Much As I Possibly Can The Implications Of What I've Done Before, What I'm Going To Do, What Other People Think About My Work, The Failure Or Success Of The Previous Play. I'm Stuck With A New Reality That I've Got To Create.

When I'm Writing A Play I Hear It Like Music. I Use The Same Indications That A Composer Does For Duration. There's A Difference, I Tell My Students, Between A Semi-colon And A Period. A Difference In Duration. And We Have All These Wonderful Things, We Use Commas And Underlining And All The Wonderful Punctuation Things We Can Use In The Same Way A Composer Uses Them In Music. And We Can Indicate, As Specifically As A Composer, The Way We Want Our Piece To Sound.