My take: four weeks spent studying poetry absolutely makes someone a better victims’ advocate. In addition to the other benefits it confers on them as citizens and people who live in the world.

Doctors, your patients are your customers. If they want a lobotomy, it’s your responsibility to provide one.

Doonesbury.

Stoppard was sometimes dismissed for writing cold plays that made you think, but when he was at his best the thinking made you feel.

What I didn’t get about Stoppard until later – which is why my thesis was dry and unreadable, and my early plays were smug and self-satisfied – was that his referentiality worked not because the plays were about literature, but because literature is about humanity.

For my undergraduate junior thesis I wrote about Stoppard and intertextuality, which is kind of like writing about John Irving and bears, or James Joyce and Ireland – don’t overexert yourself or anything there, kid.

I wouldn’t have become a playwright if I hadn’t pulled a copy of “The Real Inspector Hound” out of a pile of library scripts for a high school class project. If I hadn’t then read “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” and “Travesties,” I certainly wouldn’t have become such an annoying one.