Marsha Norman

“When 'night, Mother' opened, I did not know how long it would be before I would have another show on Broadway.”

“I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.”

“Think of a musical as a string of pearls. If you don't have a string, you can't put the pearls around your neck.”

“People do think that if they avoid the truth, it might change to something better before they have to hear it.”

“Family is just accident, Jessie. It's nothing personal, hon. They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family, they just are.”

“At the heart of the failure of most plays is the inability to carry on a thoughtful conversation about your work with yourself.”

“I see it on his face. I hear it when he talks. We look out at the world and we see the same thing: Not Fair. And the only difference between us is Ricky's out there trying to get even. And he knows not trust anybody and he got it straight from me. And he knows not to try and get work, and guess where he got that. He walks around like there's loose boards in the floor, and you know who laid that floor, I did.”

“If someone wants to say 'I love you' in a straight play, they say it, and then it's the other person's turn to talk. But in a song, you can sing about it for another three minutes. The musical form has that unique opportunity to express at length what joy really feels like.”

“The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.”

“There are days when I think the National Endowment for the Arts should issue a quota system for the production of plays by women - especially when you realize women buy 70 percent of all theater tickets.”

“No. You can't. And I can't do anything either, about my life, to change it, make it better, make me feel better about it. Like it better, make it work. But I can stop it. Shut it down, turn it off like the radio when there's nothing on I want to listen to. It's all I really have that belongs to me and I'm going to say what happens to it. And it's going to stop. And I'm going to stop it. So. Let's just have a good time.”

“My view is that musicals are love stories with great final scenes. It's just that simple. Musicals are also conflicts between two worlds. And by those criteria, 'The Color Purple' is actually exactly the kind of story that makes for a great musical. Yes, it's got hard stuff in it, but so does 'Les Miserables' and 'Phantom of the Opera.'”

“Success is always something that you have to recover from.”

“I feel that I speak the musical language.”

“What I hope to do is create a play that investigates the ongoing violence toward women and children in the world, and searches for some kind of answer to the question, 'What Can We Do?'”

“Jesus was a suicide, if you ask me.”

“Dreams are illustrations...from the book your soul is writing about you.”

“If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.”

“I'm just not having a very good time and I don't have any reason to think it'll get anything but worse. I'm tired. I'm hurt. I'm sad. I feel used.”

“Knowing is the most profound kind of love, giving someone the gift of knowledge about yourself.”