The Thing That Makes A Creative Person

Very Few People Who Met My Adoptive Mother In The Last 20 Years Of Her Life Could Abide Her, While Many People Who Have Seen My Play Find Her Fascinating. Heavens, What Have I Done?!

The Notion That Women Are Less Aesthetically Profound And Innovative Than Men--just Not Very Important, If You Know What I Mean--doubtless Spreads Back To Our Beginnings As Upright Animals: The Males Hunted And Killed For The Family While The Females Stayed Home In The Cave And Tended The Strange Little Creatures They Were Giving Birth To.

If I've Been Accused A Number Of Times Of Writing Plays Where The Endings Are Ambivalent, Indeed, That's The Way I Find Life.

Usually, The Way I Write Is To Sit Down At A Typewriter After That Year Or So Of What Passes For Thinking, And I Write A First Draft Quite Rapidly. Read It Over. Make A Few Pencil Corrections, Where I Think I've Got The Rhythms Wrong In The Speeches, For Example, And Then Retype The Whole Thing. And In The Retyping I Discover That Maybe One Or Two More Speeches Will Come In. One Or Two More Things Will Happen, But Not Much.

I Know Playwrights Who Like To Kid Themselves Into Saying That Their Characters Are So Well Formed That They Just Take Over. They Determine The Structure Of The Play. By Which Is Meant, I Suspect, Only That The Unconscious Mind Has Done Its Work So Thoroughly That The Play Just Has To Be Filtered Through The Conscious Mind. But There's Work To Be Done - And Discovery To Be Made.