The task of the playwright is to create a world that is both familiar and strange, a world that reflects our own but also challenges it.

"The beauty of literature is that it allows us to live a thousand lives in one."

The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.