“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.”

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.

There are only two things to write about: life and death.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it.

All serious art is being destroyed by commerce. Most people don’t want art to be disturbing. They want it to be escapist. I don’t think art should be escapist. That’s a waste of time.

When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.

The most profound indication of social malignancy no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.

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

Hallucinatory – that’s just the way everyday life is, in Colombia. All the time, you say to yourself, did I just see that?

In most horror films, you don’t really get to understand why this character is the way he is.

In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.

Men are just as sensitive, and in some ways more sensitive, than women are.

I’m not saying that there’s anything better than mated bliss at its best, but I’m saying that living alone is as good in its own way. But we haven’t quite given ourselves permission to recognize that.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

I wanted to be a writer first, and I struck out in the world to be a writer first, and then found stand-up as a more creative outlet, as a 3D way to be creative.

We’re learning things every decade we grow through, and ultimately, you do end up with a different way of looking at things.