I regard the theatre as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.

It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves

He's liked, but he's not well liked.

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

There is a problem on the so-called commercial stage in New York. The price of a ticket is exorbitant, and there are no longer original productions possible, apparently, on the commercial stage. They are all plays that were taken from either England or smaller theaters, off-Broadway theaters, and so on. The one justification there used to be for the commercial theater was that it originated everything we had, and now it originates nothing. But the powers that be seem perfectly content to have it that way. They don't risk anything anymore, and they simply pick off the cream.

I came out of a culture in which my uncle, my father - they were all salesmen of one kind or another. My father was a manufacturer. He also, in effect, had to sell that stuff. And if he didn't literally do it, his men did. So, selling was in the air through my boyhood. The whole idea of successfully selling was very important.