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" I have admiration for people who can do it well - the guys who wrote 'Cheers' and 'Frasier.' They created sort of a blissful comedic universe. "

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" I would rather work in the theater than anywhere else, and it does seem to be a place where stories can and should be told purely. "

" Everyone pays lip service to this whole idea of doing more new plays, and nobody ever does it. "

" I have a dog whose name is Banquo. "

" I often find it maddening to live in America, in a way that is both amusing and horrifying to me. America clings to versions of itself that are absolutely hypocritical. I can't shake my outrage at it, so I write about it. "

" I actuall have to defend realism in theatre because I think TV does it badly - so corrupted by layers of bureaucrats who want to leave examination or psychology. "

" I was born and raised in the Midwest, where people were taught that decency and integrity and community were all important values. We were democrats with a little 'd.' "

" A lot of times, I think people feel that new plays are suspect, and actually, I don't know where that came from. I completely disagree with it! "

" Rarely do I try to pull a creature out of life and make it a character. "

" Honestly, the thing that I have found to be most useful over a long career, or maintaining a long career, is taking back the power at some point and self-producing. "

" I'm actually interested in poor behavior. I'm interested in what drives people to poor behavior. "

" I remember when I was at Brandeis, Geoffrey Wolff, he was a great fiction-writing teacher. He was the writer-in-residence, and for those of us who wanted to be writers, you were so excited to be in the same hallway as him. "

" Heath Ledger's recent death, like that of River Phoenix, was handled with great care by the press. Anna Nicole Smith's not so much. "

" Because I'm an American woman, and I write straight plays, it's always been sort of assumed I would never be done on Broadway. But that was never the goal. "

" I seem to be constantly confronted by theater professionals who are more or less annoyed by the prospect of structure. "

" I'm not ashamed of being American; I'm very proud. "

" It's not my responsibility to write plays about the way the world should be. "

" I go to museums. I buy art, even. You should see my house; we don't have any wall space left. "

" We have this powerful ideological basis to the country that I don't think any other country in the world quite can brag about. It's a very complicated nation, and it's very fertile. "

" Part of the problem with producing contemporary political theater in America today is that many theaters don't have flexibility or resources, be it hiring a lot of actors or staging a work that might be tough for some audience and board members. "

" I have huge admiration for Jesus Christ and for his incredible compassion for all people. "

" Sometimes I feel that my job on earth is to put Julie White through horrible things, watch her writhe and then recover. "

" There's a thing that happens to Midwesterners - we spend a lot of time talking about having a different set of rules about manners. I don't know about ethics, but certainly about manners, what you would say and what you wouldn't say. And that is not very East coast. "

" Moliere and Arthur Miller affected me at a very young age. In adulthood, I became overwhelmed by Chekhov. Those are my big theatrical influences. "

" There are times when I wonder how I ever thought that I could dramatize the death of a national discussion as a family comedy. "

" Does art have to have high foot traffic to get funded in a recession? A lot of people, I am sure, would say absolutely not. And those postmodern art-loving loners surely would argue that even if one person likes a piece of art, that would make a museum worthwhile. "

" The myth that theater isn't for everybody is total nonsense. In the 18th and 19th centuries, everybody in America used to go to the theater all the time. The shows they went to see were big, crazy melodramas that had careening storylines and houses burning down and pretty girls in danger and comedy and death and destruction. "

" Our distorted media culture sees men as subjects and women as objects; in films, Woody Allen gets older and older and still dates 20-year-old babes; movies about women are called 'chick flicks,' and men make fun of them. "

" Is the American theatre allowing itself to become irrelevant? The problem isn't that playwrights aren't being paid enough. It's that theatres all over America are looking towards New York to tell them what new plays to do. "

" I like working with television. I do. "

" The stage gives you more control over your own work; in television, there's a distressing amount of communal writing. Unless it's your show, you have no control over that. You're at the mercy of whoever's running the show. "