“Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.”

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.

Death is release, if you’ve lived all right.

A play is fiction and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference. George: No, but we must carry on as though we did. Martha: Amen.

I think you remember everything, you just can’t bring it to mind all the time.

Every monster was a man first.

School curriculum that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians.

A lot interests me – but nothing surprises me particularly.

The characters’ lives have gone on before the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless you’ve killed them off.

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn’t matter.

Influence is a matter of selection – both acceptance and rejection.

It is a lazy public which promotes a slothful and irresponsible theater.

I find relatively little relationship between the work of art and the immediate critical response it gets.

What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.

Love goes through different stages. But it endures.

I went back to the stage because it was my way of dealing with the success I had, my way of coping.

It’s very evocative; it’s like a first cut because you hear ‘She walked to the door,’ and you visualize all these things. ‘She opens the door’ . . . because you read the stage directions, too.

Francis Ford Coppola did this early on. You tape a movie, like a radio show, and you have the narrator read all the stage directions.

The stage is different ; there’s more to act. There are more demands put on you, more experiences to go through.

You think you can do it better? Hey, go right ahead. The stage is yours.

I had my moment on the stage. The trick in life is to know when to leave.