As soon as a regular guy like Bill Clinton becomes the president, he wears a mantle of greatness. He's the president.

I like to amuse myself.

There has to be space for play in literature. We all need some breathing room.

It's a friendly act to write a lighthearted book.

Marriage is like the romantic ideal, and yet the trappings around it and the culture about it are really the opposite of that.

There is a lot of contradictions of mermaids as a symbol. I'm always interested in contradictions.

The Free Body Culture gave me a gift I might never have received had I refused to play along. It left me with an acute sense of the absurd - one I still cherish - to be there among my fellow apes, awkward and less than half-willing, aiming and missing, leaping, landing and wincing.

I came to understand that a German nudist, in 1984, loved little more than to work on his or her tan.

I used to try to write around the edges, but now I try to walk a more direct line.

I love irony.

I think the best fiction is a form of psychological suspense, even though I don't really write in that idiom.

Do we seek delicate phraseology in politics or other forms of public life? We do not.

We paint a slow picture. You can see the brushstrokes. We don't get to the point, and sometimes when we do, our readers don't notice, in fact. It's so couched in nuance, it can fly right over a person's head. 'What was that you said? I couldn't quite make it out.'

At writing workshops, they taught us to show, not tell - well, showing takes time.

In Hiroshima, bombed Aug. 6, 1945, no warning was given of the air attack, and thus no escape was possible for the mostly women, children and old people who fell victim.

In Nagasaki, American planes did drop warning leaflets - but not till Aug. 10, a day after the city was bombed.

The summer after I got divorced, my children asked to sleep in my bed again. It would be the first time we'd shared a bed since they were infants.

I have a king bed, one of those memory-foam mattresses that doesn't jiggle as you get in or out. Even if you cleaved it down the middle with a pickax, the thing wouldn't tremble. It's practically earthquake-proof.

I can be pretty dense about my own basic needs, when my focus is getting through the many small tasks of a day's work and a day's caretaking.

Oil drilling and coal mining are killing endangered wildlife, polluting rivers, creating smog over wilderness areas and blocking wildlife corridors in America's most treasured landscapes.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.

Indeed, the hype around 'Watchmen' is its curse. If you want to enjoy the comic for what it is, ignore the attributions of literariness and the novelistic pretensions with which some critics have imbued it. This isn't high culture, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's good, juicy pulp fiction with a little nuclear apocalypse thrown in.

Within the macho-melodrama tropes of the superhero genre, it's fair to say 'Watchmen' stands out for its rich entertainment, its darkness, and its lurid pleasures. Its vividly drawn panels, moody colors and lush imagery make its popularity well-deserved, if disproportionate.

The male domination and chauvinism of the comics form is either being wittily lampooned in 'Watchmen' or handily perpetuated, depending on whom you ask.

If the dinosaurs are any indication, there's a place in our pantheon for the extinct. My son has a blue plushy allosaurus he calls Spot-Spot, with whom he often sleeps.

In October 2014, for the first time in almost three-quarters of a century, a gray wolf was seen loping along the forested North Rim of the Grand Canyon, in Arizona. She had walked hundreds of miles, probably from Wyoming or Idaho.

In December 2011, a wild gray wolf set foot in California, the first sighting in almost a century. He'd wandered in from Oregon, looking for a mate.

Replace judgment with curiosity.

'Intimate Apparel' is a lyrical meditation on one woman's loneliness and desire. 'Fabulation' is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.

'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 find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.

I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.

The people sometimes who are closest to us are the ones who bear the brunt of our frustration.

Women are standing up and leaning forward and asserting their power.

I like to go into a space, listen, absorb, and then interpret.

There was no way I was going to write about Africa and not include the triumphant continuity of life that had also been part of my experience there. It's not just war and famine all the time.

I try to be led by my curiosity.

When you're fighting for an increasingly smaller portion of the pie, you turn against each other; you create reasons to hate each other.

My interest in theatre and storytelling began in my mother's kitchen. It was a meeting place for my mother's large circle of friends.

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 was really interested in the way in which poverty and economic stagnation were transforming and corrupting the American narrative.

I'm a schizophrenic writer.

The act of saying what you do helps shape you as an artist.

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.

People probably have different philosophies about this, but I think that when you're first shaping the play and trying to find a character, the initial actors that develop it end up imprinting on it - you hear their voices; you hear their rhythms. You can't help but to begin to write toward them during the rehearsal process.

I think sometimes you need distance to reflect.

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.

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