“The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn’t very difficult.

A child’s spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.

Persons are judged to be great because of the positive qualities they possess, not because of the absence of faults.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again.

Trust is like the air we breathe. When it’s present, nobody really notices; when it’s absent, everybody notices.

Peace does not mean an absence of conflicts; differences will always be there.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market.