"Well, all the plays that I was trying to write … were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from."

“Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way.”

“The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

“Work a lifetime to pay off a house — You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.”

“If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.”

“A playwright … is … the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.”

“I'm very well liked in Hartford. You know, the trouble is, Linda, people don't seem to take to me.”