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

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

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.

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.