My fault now is making my plays too short..

And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won't have to bother doing it themselves..

The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your ….

I did write a couple of original screenplays, but I'd rather write plays..

I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the pho….

There are probably brilliant people, geniuses, alive today who don't even know how to say, "Hello, how do you do?" because their minds are absorbed w….

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyrigh….

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and real….

The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christm….

That's what I like about [smoking] . . . taking a drag off of death, Mmm! Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What power! What exhilarati….

I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness..

It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don't get in trouble..

I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles..

But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn't a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I….

Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to….

My first few plays took place in the South and even The Lucky Spot was in the thirties but in Louisiana..

Plays are so much more special if they've never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each product….

In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class..

I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays..

I find it fascinating to think about what the world is going to be like when people won't talk anymore..

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright..