First, I'll Kill The Dog

If The Playwright Is Strong Enough To Hold On To Reasonable Objectivity In The Face Of Either Hostility Or Praise, He'll Do His Work The Way He Was Going To Anyway.

When You're Dealing With A Symbol In A Realistic Play, It Is Also A Realistic Fact. You Must Expect The Audience's Mind To Work On Both Levels, Symbolically And Realistically. But We're Trained So Much In Pure, Realistic Theater That It's Difficult For Us To Handle Things On Two Levels At The Same Time.

The Greatest Problem With Irish Wolfhounds, Though, Is That They Don't Live Very Long: Their Great Hearts Give Out. A Good Deal Of This Is Genetic, Of Course, But I Think It Is In Part That They Worry So For Us, Care So Much.

Usually, The Way I Write Is To Sit Down At A Typewriter After That Year Or So Of What Passes For Thinking, And I Write A First Draft Quite Rapidly. Read It Over. Make A Few Pencil Corrections, Where I Think I've Got The Rhythms Wrong In The Speeches, For Example, And Then Retype The Whole Thing. And In The Retyping I Discover That Maybe One Or Two More Speeches Will Come In. One Or Two More Things Will Happen, But Not Much.

If The Work Of Art Is Good Enough, It Must Not Be Criticized For Its Theme. I Don't Think It Can Be Argued.