“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.”

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

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 function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

I created myself, and I’ll attack anybody I feel like.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

Anything you put in a play – any speech – has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Maybe it’s a little more pertinent now since the whole concept of evolution is being questioned by the know-nothing Republican right. Yes, maybe the play’s a little more pertinent now.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.

Audiences and, to a large extent, critics who want less from theater than it is possible for it to give. If everybody’s encouraged to want less, you’ll end up with less.

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

Sincerity doesn’t mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

Very few people who met my adoptive mother in the last 20 years of her life could abide her, while many people who have seen my play find her fascinating. Heavens, what have I done?!

I actually wanted to be a producer because I like to run things.

If I’m on set and I’m in character, I’m not thinking like a producer. If I’m on set and I’m not in character, wardrobe and make-up, and I’m just coming on set for the moments that I’m not shooting, then I’m able to be the producer.

A novel is like a bow, and the violin that produces the sound is the reader’s soul.

All we seek is an America where every person is given the chance to productively contribute to his country and where he can receive a fair and equitable share of the wealth that production creates.

You really just have to love the process. I can’t tell you the amount of film sets I’ve been on where people are talking about Oscars in the middle of the production. It happens all the time.

Human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.

belief is necessarily something false that diverts and suffocates effective production.

Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression.