One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

Few occasions are as joyous to small children as funerals, almost better than the big wedding blowouts that take place at night when it's hard to stay awake. A small boy will never be harshly criticized at a funeral; he is more treasured as death comes close and all his wickedness vanishes before the inescapable fact that thank God, he is healthy.

Theater is a very changeable art. It responds to the moment in history the way the newspaper does, and there's no predicting what to come up with next.

The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.

The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always.

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.