Don’t take it on yourself. Forget now. Live.
The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.
The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.
Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.
There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.
Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.
I am a good woman. I know it.
Tragedy enlightens – and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man’s freedom. The thrust for freedom is the quality in tragedy which exalts. The revolutionary questioning of the stable environment is what terrifies.
There is a misconception of tragedy with which I have been struck in review after review, and in many conversations with writers and readers alike. It is the idea that tragedy is of necessity allied to pessimism.
Above all else, tragedy requires the finest appreciation by the writer of cause and effect.
When a deposit bottle is broken, you don’t get your nickel back.
The need of man to wholly realize himself is the only fixed star.
There are many who stay away from church these days because you hardly ever mention God any more.
I figure I’ve done what I could do, more or less, and now I’m going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...
Success, instead of giving freedom ofchoice, becomes a way of life.
Part of knowing who we are is knowing we are not someone else. And Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, the agony we cannot feel, the death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.
Like every writer, I am asked where my work originates, and if I knew I would go there more often to find more.
I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play – but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
I don’t know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.