Good Writers Define Reality; Bad Ones Merely

Some Things That Make Sense To Me Don't Make The Same Degree Of Sense To Other People.

I Usually Think About A Play Anywhere From Six Months To A Year And A Half Before I Sit Down To Write It Out.

Curiously Enough, The Only Two Plays That I've Done Very Much Revision On Were The Two Adaptations - Even Though The Shape Of Them Was Pretty Much Determined By The Original Work. With My Own Plays, The Only Changes, Aside From Taking A Speech Out Here, Putting One In There (if I Thought I Dwelled On A Point A Little Too Long Or Didn't Make It Explicit Enough), Are Very Minor; But Even Though They're Very Minor - Having To Do With The Inability Of Actors Or The Unwillingness Of The Director To Go Along With Me - I've Always Regretted Them.

About Four Years Ago I Made A List, For My Own Amusement, Of The Playwrights, The Contemporary Playwrights, By Whom Critics Said I'd Been Influenced. I Listed Twenty-five. It Included Five Playwrights Whose Work I Didn't Know, So I Read These Five Playwrights And Indeed Now I Suppose I Can Say I Have Been Influenced By Them. The Problem Is That The People Who Write These Articles Find The Inevitable Similarities Of People Writing In The Same Generation, In The Same Century, And On The Same Planet, And They Put Them Together In A Group.

Art Should Never Try To Be Popular.