The two greatest plays ever written were Hamlet and Oedipus Rex, and they're both about father-son relationships.

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

A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes.

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

A suicide kills two people, that's what it's for!