Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The American Dream is the largely unacknowledged screen in front of which all American writing plays itself out.
Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.
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 two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.
...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.
After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive.
That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?
Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.
I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.
In a dream, we are simply confronted with various loaded symbols, and where one is exhausted, it gives way to another.
A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.
I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.
The mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.
The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments, and the threats and warnings of politicians.
A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.
Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.
The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.
Pop, I'm nothing! I'm nothing, Pop. Can't you understand that? There's no spite in it any more. I'm just what I am, that's all.
The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.
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.
How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society.
The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
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.
But we are mostly what we are, and the turtle stretching toward delicious buds on high does not lighten his carapace by his resolve.
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.
Chris: 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.
The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping.
Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay. They say he give them but two words. "More weight," he says. And died.
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.
It may be that even if half consciously, we choose our personalities to maintain a certain saving balance in the family's little universe.
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
There is unquestionably a contradiction between an efficient technological machine and the flowering of human nature, of the human personality.
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.
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!
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.
A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back.
Flight Reservation Systems decide whether or not you exist. If your information isn't in their database, then you simply don't get to go anywhere.
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.
Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.
When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.
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.
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.
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.
Data is a lot like humans: It is born. Matures. Gets married to other data, divorced. Gets old. One thing that it doesn't do is die. It has to be killed.
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 number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.