Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses.
I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.
Calculating selfishness is the annihilation of self.
If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments, but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.
There is nothing new in art except talent.
Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.
By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.
In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
Advertising is the very essence of democracy.
To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.
To judge between good or bad, between successful and unsuccessful would take the eye of a God.
A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.
There are people whom even children’s literature would corrupt. They read with particular enjoyment the piquant passages in the Psalter and in the Wisdom of Solomon.
The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
When an actor has money he doesn’t send letters, he sends telegrams.
You confuse two things: solving a problem and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for an artist.
If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.