“Writing has got to be an act of discovery. Finding out things about what one is writing about.”

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.

Being different is interesting; there’s nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference, of course, produces natural caution; and if the differences are too extreme well, then, reality tends to fade away.

The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic — to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, “Do you like it? If you don’t like it, change it.

The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

That’s the happiest moment. When it’s all done. When we stop. When we can stop.

I created myself, and I’ll attack anybody I feel like.

Well, when you write about people of a certain age we are in a postsexual situation. If I write about younger people then I write sexually, because their drive is sexual. It depends upon the circumstances.

Anything you put in a play – any speech – has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

Why we are here is an impenetrable question.

Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Harebrained schemes often lead to great discoveries.

So I had to figure out for myself what was right and true. It was a search. It was a process. It drew on the moral sense that I’d learned from my parents, and in church, and in my own heart, and led me on my own journey of discovery.

Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.

Newton, (that Proverb of the Mind,) alas! Declared, with all his grand discoveries recent, That he himself felt only “like a youth Picking up shells by the great Ocean-Truth.”

This is my firm persuasion, that since the human soul exerts itself with so great activity.

I love PBS! I grew up on it. If I had to say which channels were good, I’d say, you got your PBS, your History Channel, your Discovery.

Writing is always a voyage of discovery.

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.