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

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.

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.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

You are not here accidentally – you are here meaningfully. There is a purpose behind you. The whole intends to do something through you.

We don’t make mistakes. We just have happy accidents.

The accident was a horrible thing – but that horrible thing made Chris, at the end of his life, Superman. It’s a happy irony if there is such a thing. I’m proud to have known him.

The principle of self-government cannot be violated with impunity. The individual’s right to it is sacred – regardless of class, caste, race, color, sex or any other accident or incident of birth.

We do not suffer by accident.

There is nothing that is an accident.

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.

There have been two great accidents in my life. One was the trolley, and the other was Diego. Diego was by far the worst.