If You Have No Wounds, How Can

You...you've Been Here Quite A Long Time, Haven't You?" What? Oh...yes. Ever Since I Married What's-her-name. Uh, Martha. Even Before That. Forever. Dashed Hopes, And Good Intentions. Good, Better, Best, Bested. How Do You Like That For A Declension, Young Man?

When I'm Writing A Play I Hear It Like Music. I Use The Same Indications That A Composer Does For Duration. There's A Difference, I Tell My Students, Between A Semi-colon And A Period. A Difference In Duration. And We Have All These Wonderful Things, We Use Commas And Underlining And All The Wonderful Punctuation Things We Can Use In The Same Way A Composer Uses Them In Music. And We Can Indicate, As Specifically As A Composer, The Way We Want Our Piece To Sound.

When I Was Fifteen I Wrote Seven Hundred Pages Of An Incredibly Bad Novel - It's A Very Funny Book I Still Like A Lot. Then, When I Was Nineteen I Wrote A Couple Hundred Pages Of Another Novel, Which Wasn't Very Good Either. I Was Still Determined To Be A Writer. And Since I Was A Writer, And Here I Was Twenty-nine Years Old And I Wasn't A Very Good Poet And I Wasn't A Very Good Novelist, I Thought I Would Try Writing A Play, Which Seems To Have Worked Out A Little Better.

The Health Of A Nation, A Society, Can Be Determined By The Art It Demands. We Have Insisted Of Television And Our Movies That They Not Have Anything To Do With Anything, That They Be Our Never-never Land; And If We Demand This Same Function Of Our Live Theatre, What Will Be Left Of The Visual-auditory Arts - Save The Dance (in Which Nobody Talks) And Music (to Which Nobody Listens)?

I Suppose If You Simplify Things, It's Going To Make It Easier To Understand.