“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.”

You cannot catch a child’s spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.

If I have any justification for having lived it’s simply, I’m nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There’s some value in that.

Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you coming through some door.

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.

I will never lose anything that an audience will miss

I turned things that were scripted as effects into in-camera stuff, which is sexier.

I thought it would be sexier if it were in-camera cuts. So I did that.

We’re so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don’t realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet…

All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera.

I am semi-ambivalent about being on camera – sort of low-key. I don’t like being on camera stuff that much.

The camera will never compete with the brush and the palette, until such time as photographs can be taken in Heaven or Hell.

If the thrill of hunting were in the hunt, or even in the marksmanship, a camera would do just as well.