“The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.”

I try to work every day because you have no refuge but writing.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life–live!”

The strongest influences in my life and my work are always whomever I love.

Youth must be wanton, youth must be quick, Dance to the candle while lasteth the wick.

Take by surprise and the world gives up resistance.

Openings come quickly, sometimes, like blue space in running clouds. A complete overcast, then a blaze of light.

The human heart would never pass the drunk test…. If you took the human heart out of the human body and put a pair of legs on it and told it to walk a straight line, it couldn’t do it.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

Time doesn’t take away from true friendship, nor does separation.

Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

Life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.

I always said little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by bats.

You see, baby, after a glass or two of wine I’m inclined to extravagance.

I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding.

Kill off all my demons and my angels might die too.

Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,

You are permitted to be cruel sometimes, and you are allowed to fall apart, and feel every emotion they tell you not to feel.

And, unfortunately, the cruelty and killing are often justified through a distorted interpretation of religion

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.