“Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it and there’s nobody to live in it.”
“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves”
“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.”
“Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.”
“I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you coming through some door.”
“Sometimes… it’s better for a man just to walk away. But if you can’t walk away? I guess that’s when it’s tough.”
“Everything we are is at every moment alive in us.”
“People do look to others for some leadership, and it’s not bad for them to supply it when they feel that way.”
“I believe in work. If somebody doesn’t create something, however small it may be, he gets sick. ”
“I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.”
“Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There’s no country I’ve been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, “What do you do?“ And, being American, many’s the time I’ve almost.”
“You can quicker get back a million dollars that was stolen than a word that you gave away.”
“Immortality is like trying to carve your initials in a block of ice in the middle of July.”
“Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.”
“You can’t know what the worst is until you have seen the worst.”
“Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.”
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanisation of feelings, then the ultimate develop.”
“I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I’d find you comin’ through the door.”
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”
“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
“In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.”
“I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.”
“Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.”
“You don’t realize how people can hate, they can hate so much they’ll tear the world to pieces.”
“I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.”
“You are pulling down heaven and raising up a whore”
“Just remember, kid, you can quicker get back a million dollars that was stole than a word that you gave away.”
“If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child’s smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment.”
“The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.”
“It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves.”
“The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.”
“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.”
“Until an hour before the Devil fell, God thought him beautiful in Heaven.”
“The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they’re both about father-son relationships.”
“Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.”
“I don’t know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer.”
“If you believe that life is worth living then your belief will create the fact.”
“It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.”
“… if you love your country why is it necessary to hate other countries?”
“We have not many wills, but only one –it cannot be continuously compromised without atrophy setting in altogether.”
“A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.”
“Sometimes…it’s better for a man just to walk away. But if you can’t walk away? I guess that’s when it’s tough.”
“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.”
“The political landscape changes, the issues change, but the people are still there. People don’t really change that much.”
“Everybody likes a kidder, but nobody lends him money.”
“Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?“
“A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.”
“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.”
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
“There are certain men in the world who rather see everybody hung before they’ll take blame.”
“I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept on to my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it is my own, perhaps I could s.”
“The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.”
“A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.”
“You never do any good until you get into some trouble.”
“We are only what we always were”
“Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there’s no predicting what to come up with next.”
“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
