“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.”

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 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.

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.

Fragments of the natural method must be sought with the greatest care. This is the first and last desideratum among botanists. Nature makes no jumps. All taxa show relationships on all sides like the countries on a map of the world.

The greater the struggle the more glorious the triumph.

Beware, gentle knight – the greatest monster of them all is reason.

Dancing begets warmth, which is the parent of wantonness. It is, Sir, the great grandfather of cuckoldom.

Expect great things, and great things will come.

Have great hopes and dare to go all out for them. Have great dreams and dare to live them. Have tremendous expectations and believe in them.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.

You can be greater than anything that can happen to you.