When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

Of all the classes of men, I dislike the most those who make their livings by talking - actors, clergymen, politicians, pedagogues, and so on. .... It is almost impossible to imagine a talker who sticks to the facts. Carried away by the sound of his own voice and the applause from the groundlings, he makes inevitably the jump from logic to mere rhetoric.

Hamlet has been played by 5,000 actors, no wonder he is crazy.

The way to hold a husband is to keep him a little jealous; the way to lose him is to keep him a little more jealous.

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.