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

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

First, I’ll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll just kill him.

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.

Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.

Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.

Families are a kind of leaven that helps to make the world more humane and more fraternal, where no one feels rejected or abandoned.

What is most truly valuable is often underrated.

I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

Before you reject an idea, find at least five good things about it.

Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.