"I am no nihilist. I am not even a cynic. I am, actually, rather romantic. And here's my idea of romance: You will soon be dead. Life will sometimes seem long and tough and, God, it's tiring. And you will sometimes be happy and sometimes sad. And then you'll be

The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary product. He was invented by Turgenev, and completed by Dostoevsky. Robespierre came out of the pages of Rousseau as surely as the People's Palace rose out debris of a novel. Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.

Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims?

You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist which quite a lot of playwrights especially playwrights younger than me have become guilty of.