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.

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.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

I do like to embed a fictional character firmly in an occupation.

But even with a character like Cary who is relatively outlandish, at the end of the movie he's in a place where I wouldn't have expected him to be - taking on the responsibility of a woman who is pregnant and who used to be his best friend's wife.

Always, your work is the same: You have to tell a story, you have to make a character. It doesn't matter if there are thousands of dollars, millions behind it, or if there is nothing.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

I liked Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and that is the kind of character that I would like to have played. That would have been more in tune with who I really was.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

In a lot of ways, the make-up was the character.

The more we study the Indian's character the more we appreciate the marked distinction between the civilized being and the real savage.

So many people have said that to me, that what they really like about Alex is what she brings out in Marissa, and what this situation brings out in her, a hint of happiness and another side to her character.

I've been on the show for six years and I don't even know what her history is. I sort of make things up in my mind, but I think it's hard for an audience to follow and invest in a character when they don't have the details.

It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly.

Because I killed a guy in real life, and because my character kills a guy onstage, they said I could never do anything this great again. I resented that.

Well, I go to the theater today, and its curtain - there is no curtain in this play; the lights go down and go up - and we start. And I live this character for two hours. There are only two of us in the play. And It's a complete experience.

I just kind of understood it, and I threw my love for others and love for life into the character, and was having a blast. I loved playing Dharma. I loved it!

I think if you play a character that is fearless, then it's boring. I think that's what was so incredible about Harrison Ford, is that he always seemed like he was never going to survive it, he's always scared, and yet he always does survive it somehow.