Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The most profound indication of social malignancy ... no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke.
When one controls form, one doesn't do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One does it by sensing, again intuitively.
You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.
People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.
It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.
If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
The hardest thing about a musical is making sure everybody is working on the same damn show. That is the monster.
If you love theatre, do theatre wherever you can, because theatre is theatre, and you can experience it anywhere.
I'm always writing. I'm an obsessive. It's not because I'm a disciplined person. It's because I'm crazy about it.
How happy is the sailor's life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.
I don't do my job to catch the bad guys. Why would I want to do that? No, I do my job to make order out of chaos.
A translation is no translation, he said, unless it will give you the music of a poem along with the words of it.
My personal pride is not strong enough to make me brave. But I don't know why I equate being brave with fighting.
If we cannot be decent, let us endeavor to be graceful. If we can't be moral, at least we can avoid being vulgar.
One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know and read of the miseries which affect the world.
We are never the same with others as when we are alone. We are different, even when we are in the dark with them.
A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.
Criticism and Bolshevism have one thing in common. They both seek to pull down that which they could never build.
Myth is a powerful medium because it talks to the emotions and not the head. It moves us into an area of mystery.
If it were possible to heal sorrow by weeping and to raise the dead with tears, gold were less prized than grief.
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
There is no creation without faith and hope. There is no faith and hope that does not express itself in creation.
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
Normally, even if you're on the set for 12 hours, there may be only a moment or two when you are actually useful.
In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.
With plays that require any kind of reading program, I'm reading for a couple of years before using the material.
I'm kind of perverse in that I think pessimism is helpful. My pessimism is my own kind of patriotism. My dissent.
And I have the sunset, and the Tuscan wine, and the white teeth of the women in Rome. I am a traveler in Romance.
There is nothing more unbecoming a man of quality than to laugh ... 'tis such a vulgar expression of the passion!
It takes strong men and women to love ... people strong enough inside themselves to love ... without humiliation.
Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
I know of no sentence that can induce such immediate and brazen lying as the one that begins, 'Have you read - .'
I don't really read that many magazines; I'm more of a browser. I get 'Vanity Fair' quite often if I'm on a train.
I think I'm always running away from somewhere, and to me, theatre's always felt like a good place to run away to.
your soul is an inner something that is another you and hardly anybody knows what it's really thinkin' except you.
...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.
I find my joy of living in the fierce and ruthless battles of life, and my pleasure comes from learning something.
It is less dishonor to hear imperfectly than to speak imperfectly. The ears are excused; the understanding is not.
There are two kinds of marriages, Benny — where the husband quotes the wife, or where the wife quotes the husband.
All reviews should carry a Surgeon General's warning. The good ones turn your head, the bad ones break your heart.
How can the writer know reality if it is that which gets into him and sweeps him away, forever onto the sidelines.
Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off and they are nearly always doing it.
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.