The painful secret of gods and kings is that men are free, Aegistheus. You know it and they do not.

For the artist, the color, the bouquet, the tinkling of the spoon on the saucer, are things in the highest degree. He stops at the quality of the sound or the form. He returns to it constantly and is enchanted with it.

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

Acting is a question of absorbing other people's personalities and adding some of your own experience.

What never vary are the necessities of being in the world, of having to labor and to die there.

A lost battle is a battle one thinks one has lost.

I said to myself, 'I want to die decently'.