“I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.”

The only time I’ll get good reviews is if I kill myself.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

When a play enters my consciousness, is already a fairly well-developed fetus. I don’t put down a word until the play seems ready to be written.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

Dashed hopes and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested.

Art has an obligation to offend.

As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I’ve been influenced by every single play I’ve ever experienced.

Art should never try to be popular.

I write to find out what I’m talking about.

When you get old, you can’t talk to people because people snap at you…. That’s why you become deaf, so you won’t be able to hear people talking to you that way.

Writing has got to be an act of discovery, I write to find out what I’m thinking about.

Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, who’s afraid of living life without false illusions.

If you’re willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

I don’t feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.

What I mean by an educated taste is someone who has the same tastes that I have.

In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.

If the people raise a great howl against my barbarity and cruelty.

The only unforgivable sin is deliberate cruelty.

War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.

Because it is in the nature of things that they become extreme, we have passed down from manliness to cruelty. If I had been told when I was 20 that there was a tavern in the town where the brave and the cruel were gathered together,

You are permitted to be cruel sometimes, and you are allowed to fall apart, and feel every emotion they tell you not to feel.

And, unfortunately, the cruelty and killing are often justified through a distorted interpretation of religion

Dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.