It is the function of a liberal university not to give right answers, but to ask right questions.

Invention despoils observations, insinuation invalidates memory. A stewpot of bad habits, all of it - so that imaginative writers wind up, by and large, a shifty crew, sunk in distortion, misrepresentation, illusion, imposture, fakery.

I was so mad at my agent. I had polished and polished and polished [the play], and he referred to it as a draft. I wrote him a bitter letter: How can you call this a draft? I don't do drafts! By now I've done 18, and its turning, in the rehearsal room, into a 19th.

Time heals all things but one: Time.

What we think we are surely going to do, we don't do; and what we never intended to do, we may one day notice that we have done, and done, and done.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim.