“Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.”

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.

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.

Semi-colons only prove that the author has been to college.

Shakespeare wrote without knowing he would become Shakespeare

The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the work progresses.

Once you have lived with another, it is a great torture to have to live alone.

Of the authors writing in English, I’d mention Shakespeare and Milton. But all this is terribly high-hat and makes me sound very po-faced, I’m afraid; however, I just happen to like these enormous, swinging, great creatures.

This fear is one of the horrors of an author’s life. Where does work come from? What chance, what small episode will start the chain of creation?

I’m not a military general, a business guru, not a philosopher or author. It’s only me.

Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.