“The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.”

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.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.

A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that’s what it’s for!

I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

When your life is working there will be an absence of drama.

Absence, the highest form of presence.

The secret of success is that it is not the absence of failure, but the absence of envy.

The problem in my life and other people’s lives is not the absence of knowing what to do but the absence of doing it.

Adversity has the effect of drawing out strength and qualities of a man that would have laid dormant in its absence.

We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

If they don’t appreciate your presence, they may never recognize your absence.

Moral courage is the most valuable and usually the most absent characteristic in men.