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.

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.

Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

Singularity shows something wrong in the mind.

Remember above all that mental stability comes by examining the contents of the mind, not by avoidence.

I think we will have a boy baby and he will be born on the 20th of August. Everyone else has a girl baby and at times I don't believe I should mind having a little Phyllis Dawn but Dearest wants a boy and I do.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

But if anyone supposes that there was no commercial fraud in the Middle Ages, let him study the commercial legislation of England for that period, and his mind will be satisfied, if he has a mind to be satisfied and not only a fancy to run away with him.

The mind moves in the direction of our currently dominant thoughts.

I love the male body, it's better designed than the male mind.

Disney had such a hold on the mind of America-they were Adolf Hitler. The whole country thought Disney was some sort of god and that animation was some sort of pure thing for children.

One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind.

I did know that the book would end with a mind-boggling trial, but I didn't know exactly how it would turn out. I like a little suspense when I am writing, too.

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprung up.

With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above, and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.