“It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy – the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.”

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

In your silence, I found my answer.

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers.

There is a built-in sense of indebtedness in the consciousness of man, an awareness of owing gratitude, or being caled upon at certain moments to reciprocate

Being an intellectual creates a lot of questions and no answers. You can fill your life up with ideas and still go home lonely.

God, the true Philosopher’s Stone, Who answers every prayer, Lies hidden deep within your heart.

Poetry is unfallen speech. Paradise knew no other, for no other would suffice to answer the need of those ecstatic days of innocence.

Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations.

Don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.