“All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.”

You cannot catch a child’s spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.

Man must shape his tools lest they shape him.

Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.

If I have any justification for having lived it’s simply, I’m nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There’s some value in that.

Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.

I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you coming through some door.

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

I’m the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

If I see an ending, I can work backward.

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.

There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars; General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer: For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

Everybody has a light and a dark side, and neither can exist without the other.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!

I’m not a slave to a God that doesn’t exist, and I’m not a slave to a world that doesn’t give a shit.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.