who is best known for The Zoo Story
(1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(1962), and a rewrite of the screenplay for the unsuccessful musical version of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's
(1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd
that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Jean Genet
, Samuel Beckett
, and Eugène Ionesco
.
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.
I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humour.
The gods too are fond of a joke.
You gotta have a swine to show you where the truffles are.
One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.
I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say — it leaves me something to do.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
A play is fiction — and fiction is fact distilled into truth.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, [but] every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.