When the guns roar, the arts die.

Whoever is writing in the United States is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to mans pretensions.

I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something.

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.

Why am I trying to become what I don’t want to be … when all I want is out there, waiting for me the minute I say I know who I am.

Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?

PROCTOR, his mind wild, breathless: I say--I say--God is dead!