Playwright

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

Manusia harus membentuk alat-alatnya agar mereka tidak membentuk dirinya.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

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.

Let you look sometimes for the goodness in me, and judge me not.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

Without alienation, there can be no politics.

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 think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

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.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.

I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.