I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things, because you can go up a dead end and discover that it's beyond your capacity to discover some organism underneath your feeling, and you're left simply with a formless feeling which is not itself art. Its inexpressible and one must leave it until it is hardened and becomes something that has form and has some possibility of being communicated. It might take a year or two or three or four to emerge.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up n…

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance - you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

My conception of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about with him what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which …

When I start writing a poem, I don't think about models or about what anybody else in the world has done.

Music to me is spontaneous, writing is spontaneous and it's all based on not trying to do it. From beginning to end, whether it's writing a song, or playing gu…

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite- getting something down.