Marsha Norman

“When you fight something long enough, it becomes a center pole right in your life and you count on it to be there to fight with.”

“Music expresses longing and love and joy better than any piece of dialogue you can ever write.”

“After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as ''night, Mother.'”

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

“I'm who I was waiting for. I didn't make it.”

“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.”

“I have had an inordinate and painful concern for the audience in my writing career.”

“There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it.”

“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.”

“Art is how a culture records its life, how it poses questions for the next generation and how it will be remembered.”

“I feel that I speak the musical language.”

“People listen to music with cavemen ears: Is it a bird song or the call of a lion? The audience at a musical is dancing in their hearts.”

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

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

“Write about the thing that frightens you most.”

“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?'”

“We have to hear the stories of women at all ages of their lives in order to really present a picture of what it felt like to be alive in our time. That's what our job is as writers is to present that and create it. Our job as writers isn't to make as much money as we can. Our job is to create a record of this time. That's why if you leave out women and the stories of women, we failed at our mission. All of us. Men and women.”