When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.

I know the outer world as well as you do, and I judge it. You know nothing of my inner world, and yet you presume to judge that world.

Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.

Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery.

A gramme is better than a damn.

The critics don't interest me because they're concerned with what's past and done, while I'm concerned with what comes next.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies - the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.