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If You Want A Commercial Success - It's The Confusion Of Commerce With Art. A Successful Play Is Not Considered To Be The Best Written. It Is The One That Sells The Most Tickets. Those Standards Are Destructive [to Theatre].

There Are Two Things That A Playwright Can Have. Success Or Failure. I Imagine There Are Dangers In Both. Certainly The Danger Of Being Faced With Indifference Or Hostility Is Discouraging, And It May Be That Success - Acceptance If It's Too Quick, Too Lightning-quick - Can Turn The Heads Of Some People.

I'm Back In Fashion Again For A While Now. But I Imagine That Three Or Four Years From Now I'll Be Out Again. And In Another Fifteen Years I'll Be Back. If You Try To Write To Stay In Fashion, If You Try To Write To Be The Critics' Darling, You Become An Employee.

Some Writers' View Of Things Depends Upon The Success Of The Final Result. I'd Rather Stand Or Fall On My Own Concepts. But There Is A Fine Line To Be Drawn Between Pointing Up Something Or Distorting It.

About Four Years Ago I Made A List, For My Own Amusement, Of The Playwrights, The Contemporary Playwrights, By Whom Critics Said I'd Been Influenced. I Listed Twenty-five. It Included Five Playwrights Whose Work I Didn't Know, So I Read These Five Playwrights And Indeed Now I Suppose I Can Say I Have Been Influenced By Them. The Problem Is That The People Who Write These Articles Find The Inevitable Similarities Of People Writing In The Same Generation, In The Same Century, And On The Same Planet, And They Put Them Together In A Group.