Unless You Are Terribly, Terribly Careful, You

You Find Very Few Critics Who Approach Their Job With A Combination Of Information And Enthusiasm And Humility That Makes For A Good Critic. But There Is Nothing Wrong With Critics As Long As People Don't Pay Any Attention To Them. I Mean, Nobody Wants To Put Them Out Of A Job And A Good Critic Is Not Necessarily A Dead Critic. It's Just That People Take What A Critic Says As A Fact Rather Than An Opinion, And You Have To Know Whether The Opinion Of The Critic Is Informed Or Uninformed, Intelligent Of Stupid -- But Most People Don't Take The Trouble.

What Happens In A Play Is Determined To A Certain Extent By What I Thought Might Be Interesting To Have Happen Before I Invented The Characters, Before They Started Taking Over What Happened, Because They Are Three-dimensional Individuals, And I Cannot Tell Them What To Do. Once I Give Them Their Identity And Their Nature, They Start Writing The Play.

Within A Year After I Write A Play I Forget The Experience Of Having Written It. And I Couldn't Revise Or Rewrite It If I Wanted To. Up Until That Point, I'm So Involved With The Experience Of Having Written The Play, And The Nature Of It, That I Can't See What Faults It Might Have. The Only Moment Of Clear Objectivity That I Can Find Is At The Moment Of Critical Heat - Of Self-critical Heat When I'm Actually Writing.

Few Sensible Authors Are Happy Discussing The Creative Process--it Is, After All, Black Magic.

I Discover That I Am Thinking About A Play, Which Is The First Awareness I Have That A New Play Is Forming. When I'm Aware Of The Play Forming In My Head, It's Already At A Certain Degree In Development.