“All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.”

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.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

We are too late for the gods and too early for Being.

Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.

It is not without cause that men feel the burden of their existence, though they are themselves the cause of those burdens.

The secret to your existence is right in front of you. It manifests itself as all those things you know you should do but are avoiding.

Insight is not about arriving at better perspectives for the existing situation but seeing new possibilities. What you need for this is clarity within yourself.

Obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only to be broken.

When existence reveals itself as existentially intolerable, thinking collapses in on itself. In such situations – in the depths—it’s noticing, not thinking, that does the trick.

You cannot leave and have me too I cannot exist in two places at once-when you ask if we can still be friends.