Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I swear, if you existed I'd divorce you.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly.

He that has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a rope.

I am convinced that no one is fully educated without a full grounding in the arts.

It's a good idea to have friends both in Heaven and in Hell.

My exposure to Beckett and to late O'Neill was probably important right at the time I gave up poetry and the novel.

Never marry for money; you can borrow it cheaper.

Old people whimper, and cry, and belch, and make great hollow rumbling sounds at table; old people wake up in the middle of the night screaming, and find out they haven't even been asleep; and when old people are asleep, they try to wake up, and they can't... not for the longest time.

That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed.

The avant-garde theater is fun; it is free-swinging, bold, iconoclastic, and often wildly, wildly funny. If you will approach it with childlike innocence - putting your standard responses aside, for they do not apply - if you will approach it on its own terms, I think you will be in for a liberating surprise.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process--it is, after all, black magic.

Being different is ... interesting theres nothing implicitly inferior or superior about it. Great difference of course produces natural caution and if the differences are too extreme ... well then reality tends to fade away.

The final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate audience or critical response.

Any definition which limits us is deplorable.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve

Progress is a set of assumptions.

Sincerity doesn't mean anything. A person can be sincere and be more destructive than a person who is insincere.

At the end, the realization is that she had to get to a place in her life where she could drop her guard and make peace with the fact that whether she had a small amount of time, that she had to kind of live it completely through, instead of living by the rules.

President Johnson and I have a lot in common. We were both born in small towns and we're both fortunate in the fact that we think we married above ourselves.

The fact is I've been in Massachusetts for the last two weeks, and it seems over the last few days that the price is increasing by the hour at the pump, so there needs to be an aggressive investigation.

In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.

Working-class Americans have waited too long, close to a decade in fact, for an increase in the minimum wage. This has been the second longest period without a pay raise since the Federal minimum wage law was first enacted in 1938.

The fact is, Latinos now own their own lives and I believe they can afford to look back without judgment.

The fact that it's science fiction gives you the license to do anything you want to do.

It has to do with the fact that Ford, for all his greatness, is an Irish egomaniac, as anyone who knows him will say.

I never knew a more presumptuous person than myself. The fact that I say that shows that what I say is true.

I think the fact that I'm so well known to be gay makes it very difficult to have a convincing relationship with a woman on screen. It wouldn't be at all difficult for me to kiss a woman - I'll kiss a frog if you like.

People expect us to be different, but we're not. We're very similar people, and it's because we're so similar and close to each other that we make each other laugh - in fact we make each other laugh more than we make anyone else laugh.

I can't tell you how hard I worked the last year. In fact, I worked so hard that I know I can't maintain that same work level in 2001, so I've got to quit something.

The miracle of light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slowly moving, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades. It is a river of grass.

The key to accepting responsibility for your life is to accept the fact that your choices, every one of them, are leading you inexorably to either success or failure, however you define those terms.

In fact I have nightmares about having children. I want to carry a baby and feel the life within me and in my dream, I do. But every time after it's born, there's this incredible fear, this pounding pulse of fear. It's a real bad nightmare.

All my songs were solo voices. Just me singing. In fact, that was the gimmick - no gimmick. Just singing straight with not too much background.