The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order – for meaning.
Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
He wants to live on through something – and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. All of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.
Can anyone remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.
Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.
The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn’t very difficult.
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way you don’t stay.
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.
It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family’s little universe.
It was not really possible to understand oneself, let alone another human being.
It occurs to me that with all the television people watch, most of their acquaintances are actors.