The culture of the United States has flooded the world. It's the inevitable result of a powerful culture, art. We've got an instinctive touch when it comes to the popular mind because we've had no aristocracy. It is a democratic country. And we know without knowing it, without bothering to understand it, how to reach ordinary people, sometimes with the most vulgar, worthless junk on the face of the earth, but we know how to do it [laughter].

The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

Sometimes...it's better for a man just to walk away. But if you can't walk away? I guess that's when it's tough.

Controlled hysteria is what's required. To exist constantly in a state of controlled hysteria. It's agony. But everyone has agony. The difference is that I try to take my agony home and teach it to sing.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

I realized what a ridiculous lie my whole life has been.