An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

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.

When today fails to offer the justification for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing.

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

Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

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