“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.”

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.

Do not follow the desires of your lower self. Should the Lord wish.

A nurse is to maintain the air within the room as fresh as the air without, without lowering the temperature.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

A hundred yards away, Mike Newton was lowering Bella’s limp body to the sidewalk. She slumped unresponsively against the wet concrete, her skin chalky as a corpse. I almost took the door off the car.

Love always elevates the character of man. It never lowers him, provided love be love.

The behavior of men to the lower animals, and their behavior to each other, bear a constant relationship.

Efforts to preserve all industries will lower the national standard of living.

That is what lower performers do; they make others wrong for doing what is necessary in order to make themselves feel okay about doing nothing! The highest performers-the winners-respond by studying successful people and duplicating success.