After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as 'night, Mother.'

How can I get up everyday knowing you had to kill yourself to make it stop hurting and I was here all the time and I never even saw it. And then you gave me this chance to make it better, convince you to stay alive and I couldn’t do it. How can I live with myself after this, Jessie?

I never said I knew much. How was I supposed to learn anything living out here? I didn’t know enough to do half the things I did in my life. Things happen. You do what you can about them and you see what happens next.

Why do you have to know so much about things, Jessie? There’s just not that much to things that I could ever see.

In the theater, when people hear that you’re writing a play, they want to know what it’s all about, whether there’s a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you’re really ready to have company.

What’s so good about a heaven where, one of these days, you’re going to get your embarrassing old body back?

I’m who I was waiting for. I didn’t make it.

No. You can’t. And I can’t do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there’s nothing on I want to listen to. It’s all I really have that belongs to me and I’m going to say what happens to it. And it’s going to stop. And I’m going to stop it. So. Let’s just have a good time.

There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn’t have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.

There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women – especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.