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" I need a release from whatever I'm writing. "

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" If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that. "

" The person whose work introduced me to the craft was Lorraine Hansberry. The person who taught me to love the craft was Tennessee Williams. The person who really taught me the power of the craft was August Wilson, and the person who taught me the political heft of the craft was Arthur Miller. "

" It remains an incredible struggle for women in theater, and, in particular, playwrights and directors, to get their work seen and to not only get seen, but to get it to Broadway. "

" My fears about where theater is going - it's the Hollywood model, where people are chasing the almighty dollar and making commercial decisions based on nothing more than generating income for themselves and their theaters. "

" In many ways, I consider those to be my formative years, because when you're in school, you have a distant relationship to the world in that most of what you're learning is from books and lectures. But at Amnesty, I came face to face with realities in a very direct and harsh way. "

" It's very important for me to have dialogues across racial lines. "

" I always thought of my mother as a warrior woman, and I became interested in pursuing stories of women who invent lives in order to survive. "

" In listening to the narratives of the Congolese, I came to terms with the extent to which their bodies had become battlefields. "

" Winning the second Pulitzer firmly places me in conversation with this culture. "

" If you're looking at the people who head the institutions, there are very few African Americans or people of colour. I'm talking about the major theatres that position themselves as serving all audiences. What you find is, by and large, people who are shaping what we see, and the people who are the tastemakers are white. "

" Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics. "

" By the sheer act of writing, we are trying to place value on the stories that we're invested in. "

" I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past. "

" My parents are avid consumers of art, collectors of African American paintings, and have always gone to the theater. My mother has always been an activist, too. As long as I can remember, we were marching in lines. "

" As a woman of color, slowly and with some coercing, the not-for-profit theaters around the country are beginning to recognize and embrace the power of our stories, but with regards to Broadway and other commercial venues, we remain very much marginalized and excluded from that larger creative conversation. "

" I think folks who are resistant to engaging in art become less so once they encounter art that really reflects them. "

" The presence of a bed changes the way people interact. "

" I teach at Columbia, and I'm always looking for books I can lose myself in during the 45 minutes I'm on the train. "

" There's never any ebb in human misery. "

" It's very easy, when we're reading those articles on the 20th page of 'The New York Times,' to distance ourselves and say, 'It's someone else.' "

" The essence of creativity is to look beyond where you can actually see. I don't want to dwell in same place too long. "

" I'm always hyperaware of the way in which working people are portrayed on the stage. "

" I am a storyteller by trade. "

" All of my plays are about people who have been marginalized... erased from the public record. "

" In senior year at college, Paula Vogel was my playwriting teacher; she is the first person to introduce me to the notion that a woman could actually forge a career in the theatre. Up until then, the possibility seemed remote and inaccessible, as I had very few role models who directly touched my life. "

" When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about. "

" 'Ruined' was a play which was somewhat of an anomaly in that I did not take a commission until it was finished because I really wanted to explore the subject matter unencumbered. Otherwise, I felt as though I'd have the voice of dramaturges and literary managers saying, 'This is great, but we'll never be able to produce it.' "

" I've been asked a lot why didn't 'Ruined' go to Broadway. It was the most successful play that Manhattan Theatre Club has ever had in that particular space, and yet we couldn't find a home on Broadway. "

" I know what I'm trying to say, so I'm always open to learning how to say it. "

" In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity. "