The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.

It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard.

Get into the scene late; get out of the scene early.

It is the writer’s job to make the play interesting. It is the actor’s job to make the performance truthful.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.

I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact.