Ellen McLaughlin quotes:

One of the reasons I admire David Lindsay-Abaire's work is that he, like the Greeks I've spent so much of my professional life contemplating, is not afraid of taking on the big stuff - huge, human, moral issues - what do we owe to those we love?

I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.

Not just my parents, but teachers, friends, mentors - a host of people are to be thanked for any success I have had, and a whole lot of just plain luck.

In 'Angels in America,' I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.

I just realized at some point that I was hopelessly in love with the theater. I fought it for a long time because I thought theater was for, you know, insufferable actors.

I go to the theater because I need help dealing with my life; I want to see the greatest questions addressed. I need to see actors grappling with things that matter.

In Angels in America, I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.

I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much.

The more you head into the maelstrom, the more vulnerable you are, of course. But it's what you owe to whatever gift you have.

I'm very comfortable in the air. And if you're really in love with flight, you're in love to a certain extent with being outside of the body, not grounded. The problem is, if you're not in your body, you can't actually feel anything particularly authentically.

I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.

The sensation of flying is incredible, and its such a miraculous notion to go into the air and see the world without delineation.