“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 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.

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.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

I’m of the school of thought where, if you can’t sort something out for yourself, no one can help you. Rehab is great for some people but not others.

I do what I do. You like it, great. You don’t, go listen to somebody else. I’m stickin’ with the people who stuck with me.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

It was very much about performances, the whole ensemble thing was just great – everybody working together. Sometimes it didn’t feel like a film set. It wasn’t technically driven, it was very, very enjoyable.

I still believe that music is one of the greatest gifts that God gave to man.

Everything great I’ve done I did not think to do so.