“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.”

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.

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 mind and the body are like parallel universes. Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one

Learning is an active process. We learn by doing.. Only knowledge that is used sticks in your mind.

Open your mind, allow your feelings to be expressed, to be pushed out, and your heart will neither break nor burst, but be a free-flowing channel of the life energy in your soul.

Keep your mind open to change all the time. Welcome it. Court it. It is only by examining and reexamining your opinions and ideas that you can progress.

Fear doesn’t exist anywhere except in the mind.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

For me, it might sound cliche, but beauty for me really does start on the inside. It’s like a state of mind, a state of love if you will. Then, whatever you can do on the outside is all like a bonus.

I am very career minded, and I think my personality is more suited to America. I am a working mum.