“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.”

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 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.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.

All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.

It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?

When a mean wretch cannot vie with another in virtue, out of his wickedness he begins to slander. The abject envious wretch will slander the virtuous man when absent, but when brought face to face his loquacious tongue becomes dumb.

There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this [abortion]. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?

When you’re lecturing teenagers and they begin to hum and leave the room, you can sense there is hostility.

Humility is the beginning of true intelligence.

The best time for a new beginning is anytime you want it to be.

If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy or both-you must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance – the idea that anything is possible.

Barcelona is always a club that, at the beginning of the season, wants to win everything. I will try my best to do that with them and I’m sure I will help as much as I can.