STEPHEN KARAM

When you're the artsy, weirdo, introverted outsider growing up, you don't fit into your community.

I think it's scary to be alive, but also exhilarating and joyful.

If you fail on your own terms, that's a pretty good way to go down.

'Columbinus' was four years of my life, collaborating with a lot of people and gathering lots of information.

I like creating the illusion that suddenly I've just done five things at once.

I've always viewed 'Sons of the Prophet' as the first part of a larger trilogy - not three plays dependent on each other but three stand-alone plays connected by theme and, likely, further adventures of the Douaihy family.

I think 'Speech & Debate' surprised people because it's a play about teenagers that took the teenagers very seriously. They are very real. People wanted to see if they identified with one of the kids, that loneliness, that yearning for something bigger. That feeling of being stuck, it's very adolescent, but those kinds of feelings linger on.

I lived in a basement duplex on 96th Street on the Upper West Side.

I'm drawn to writers with skill sets I don't have.

To see professional actors do my work, to take it seriously - that was the thing that made me think playwriting could actually be what I do. It's not a profession that has some sort of clear career track, like, 'This is what you do to be a playwright.'

I didn't quite fit in in any particular, specific way. I was a gay teenager who was into drama.

I hope to be known as a writer who told the truth.

I think the best directors aren't afraid to ask questions.

I think that I'm going to write a bigger thing, and then I end up writing about people, and the bigger thing recedes into the background, and hope that it's still there.

To be totally honest, I thought I would have a Broadway debut in the distant, distant future, maybe in my 60s or 70s when somebody revived one of my off-Broadway plays with a star.

Because I didn't go to graduate school or have mentorship out of college, meeting other playwrights and developing those friendships as a result of being a 'grown up' playwright - that's become an essential community for me. My contemporaries are all my mentors whether they know it or not.

I definitely prefer to write under my own volition and see what happens.

I don't come from a family of artists.

In writing 'The Humans,' I obsessed over the financial district and the architecture.

I think being gay has resulted in gay characters standing front and center in all of my work.

Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.

Janet Carroll and Robert Pine, Chris Pine's dad, were in my first play, and they were so astonishingly good, I felt it raised my game instantly.

In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.

Traditionally, I like to watch my plays from the very back.

If there's ever a moment when I am an Anglophile, it's when I see so many theatres in this country that have what I would call federal funding.