 The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality. |
| The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. |
| You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return. |
| If I see an ending, I can work backward. |
| Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value. |
| A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself. |
| Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not. |
| The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility. |
| Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. |
| Betrayal is the only truth that sticks. |
| Man must shape his tools lest they shape him. |
| The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life. |
| I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem. |
| In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera. |
| The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism. |
| He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. |
| I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act. |
| Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author. |
| Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money. |
| All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen. |
