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.

...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself.

...an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.

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

Today, [theatre's] more likely to be consciously not aimed at the public, but at a more sophisticated or educated public. . . . The result is that some of the sheer humanity has leaked out of the enterprise.

A doctor could make a million dollars if he could figure out a way to bring a boy into the world without a trigger finger.

Memory inevitably romanticizes, pressing reality to recede like pain.