Israel Horovitz

Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.

I have never written a play, a story, a poem, or my one film - anything - unless something was troubling me enough, wrecking me, in fact, to drive me back into the absurdity of writing. I do not enjoy writing.

The Holocaust story has been told and retold so many times.

I was not to the manor born.

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre.

I have a visceral response to a memory of working-class life.

I've done nothing with my life but write plays.

I learned Hebrew from a high school teacher named Mr. Cohen. We would drive down the highway to meet his car, and Jewish boys from these Massachusetts towns would sit in his car and learn the lessons.

My dream is to have a small company in France.

If work isn't rooted in comedy, people will turn from it, or they'll use it like soap opera.

It's one of the terrors of old age that your body is not your friend. Or to be out on the street and be frightened of someone because you're not in good shape and can't do anything about it.

I grew up in Wakefield, Mass., and there were only a couple of Jewish families in the town.