If you put someone in a room with no script to direct, they're just going to sit there. Writing scripts is the execution for a show. Then the director takes that and hires people. It's like trying to build a house without any bricks.

I'd like to thank everybody who ever punched or kissed me in my life and everybody who I ever punched or kissed.

Whatever you do in terms of telling a story, the most important thing that you can define is who you are.

If I could, Sister James, I would certainly choose to live in innocence. But innocence can only be wisdom in a world without evil. Situations arise and we are confronted with wrongdoing and the need to act.

All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it.

There are people who...tell you that the light in your heart is a weakness. Don't believe it! It's an old tactic of cruel people to kill kindness in the name of virtue.

Where the terror is, you must go.

People ask me if I believe in things: in God, in astrology, and I say, absolutely! I believe in everything! And I believe in its opposite. Like the positive and negative volts on a battery, you need both for power.

Theatre is the safe place to do the unsafe things that need to be done.

Trying to lead an interesting life, a fruitful life, is a big challenge.

I have doubts! I have such doubts!

Everything is painful, so why not be honest about the pain?