Stephen Karam

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Good actors can tell you more about your play than 1,000 hours alone at your desk.”

“My own journey as a writer has been the discovery of different theatrical voices. Chekhov was a revelation. Tennessee Williams was another one. We read 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and I still remember the cover.”

“I was not exposed to a lot of culture. The shows we saw in high school, like 'Phantom of the Opera' and 'Miss Saigon,' were thrilling. But my love affair with theater started with seeing a production of 'Little Shop of Horrors' that my sister was in.”

“I don't come from a family of artists.”

“I don't know how to produce work if it's not something that's deeply scaring me or troubling me.”

“I was sending off my plays almost like an 8-year-old would send letters to Santa Claus. So it was a bit of a miracle when the Blank Theatre Company actually called and selected a terrible little play that I wrote.”

“I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after graduation as an intern at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It's a town that has many people living the polygamous lifestyle.”

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

“I don't think I could write a good play if I was setting out to write about the death of the American middle class.”

“Sometimes you realize you don't give people in your hometown enough credit.”

“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.”

“Chekhov would have been an excellent screenwriter. He is singularly good at dipping in and out of a group of people's lives, like Robert Altman did.”

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

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

“That the best piece of art a person is capable of making is the one that only they could create.”

“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.”