“If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.”

Success and failure are equally disastrous.

The helpless can’t help the helpless.

Talent? What is talent but the ability to get away with something?

Life is an unanswered question, but let’s still believe in the dignity and importance of the question.

How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven’t I done time enough, haven’t I served my term? can’t I apply for a-pardon?

Death is one moment, and life is so many of them.

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do, then go ahead and do it with ease.

We’ve had this date with each other from the beginning.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn’t love you.

A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician.

It’s hard enough for me to write what I want to write without me trying to write what you say they want me to write which I don’t want to write.

The world is a funny paper read backwards. And that way it isn’t so funny.

Friends are God’s way of apologizing to us for our families

All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.

Don’t you think there is always something unspoken between two people?

One can only pour out of a jug that which is in it.

Mama always taught her children that words were pretty, but anyone can talk. She said, pay attention to that man or woman who acted, who did, who performed. She taught us to trust in thing we could see, not that we heard.

Live so that you can at least get the benefit of the doubt.

A man is the sum of his actions, of what he has done, of what he can do, Nothing else.

I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

When people tell me I can’t do something, I have a visceral reflex to say, ‘Yes, I can.’

The hardest thing is to take less when you can get more.