The One Living Playwright I Admire Without

What I Wanted To Get At Is The Value Difference Between Pornographic Playing-cards When You're A Kid, And Pornographic Playing-cards When You're Older. It's That When You're A Kid You Use The Cards As A Substitute For A Real Experience, And When You're Older You Use Real Experience As A Substitute For The Fantasy.

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.

I Find That In The Course Of The Day When I'm Writing, After Three Or Four Hours Of Intense Work, I Have A Splitting Headache, And I Have To Stop. Because The Involvement, Which Is Both Creative And Self-critical, Is So Intense That I've Got To Stop Doing It.

The One Living Playwright I Admire Without Any Reservation Whatsoever Is Samuel Beckett. I Have Funny Feelings About Almost All The Others.

By Some Curious Mischance, A Couple Of My Plays Managed To Hit An Area Where Commercial Success Was Feasible. But It's Wrong To Think I'm A Commercial Playwright Who Has Somehow Ceased His Proper Function. I Have Always Been The Same Thing - Which Is Not A Commercial Playwright. I'm Not After The Brass Ring.