“I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.”

Every monster was a man first.

School curriculum that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians.

A lot interests me – but nothing surprises me particularly.

The characters’ lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you’ve killed them off.

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter.

Influence is a matter of selection – both acceptance and rejection.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don’t want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don’t think art should be escapist. That’s a waste of time.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

The most profound indication of social malignancy no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

Being different is interesting; there’s nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme well, then, reality tends to fade away.

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic — to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, “Do you like it? If you don’t like it, change it.

The unhappy are egotistical, base, unjust, cruel, and even less capable of understanding one another than are idiots. Unhappiness does not unite people, but separates them.

We forget cruelty and past betrayal, Heedless of where the next bright bolt may fall.

When I cannot understand my Father’s leading, And it seems to be but hard and cruel fate, Still I hear that gentle whisper ever pleading, God is working, God is faithful-Only wait.

I believe we all deserve good endings. We were kind people before this world turned us cruel.

The soul that has conceived one wickedness can nurse no good thereafter.

Cruelty and fear shake hands together.

I am always suspicious of righteous indignation. Nothing is more cruel than righteous indignation.

Man’s highest duty is to protect animals from cruelty.