In the trees the night wind stirs, bringing the leaves to life, endowing them with speech; the electric lights illuminate the green branches from the under side, translating them into a new language.

The crickets felt it was their duty to warn everybody that summertime cannot last for ever. Even on the most beautiful days in the whole year - the days when summer is changing into autumn - the crickets spread the rumour of sadness and change.

If the onset of wrinkles in middle age were referred to as laughter lines, then to look at him, Scott thought, Twinkle's life must have been hilarious. He had sharp eyes that often seemed to visually contradict the lack of intelligence that could be derived from listening to him talk. There might not be a lot to respect in Twinkle, but Scott liked him. He just didn't want to end up like him.

Somewhere deep inside, his humanity had been shaken by something so unnatural, so foreign in its essence, his very being withdrew from it...

I flatter myself a terribly liberal New York playwright, but his prose floored me because it was so extreme, ... I found myself asking, 'Wow, does this have any value? Does this merit a place on bookshelves?' And I thought, if he could unnerve me so completely, then maybe he'd be a worthwhile subject for drama. Maybe he'd be the kind of figure about whom I could write a parable about free speech that made liberals and conservatives equally nervous.

New York is strange in the summer. Life goes on as usual but it’s not, it’s like everyone is just pretending, as if everyone has been cast as the star in a movie about their life, so they’re one step removed from it. And then in September it all gets normal again.