Annie Baker

I don't enjoy hearing the sound of my voice. The most important things for me are impossible to articulate extemporaneously.

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself.

I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.

I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.

I'm really trying to stop setting my plays in this one fictional town in Vermont.

If anything, I was the opposite of most college students who think they can do anything.

I feel like there's an obsession with pace right now in theater, with things being very fast and very witty and very loud, and I think we're all so freaked out about theater keeping audiences interested because everybody's so freaked out about theater becoming irrelevant.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.