The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise - the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream - be set down alive?

This monster of a land, this mightiest of nations, this spawn of the future, turns out to be the macrocosm of microcosm me.

My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and power and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.

For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it.

One day we'll sit and you'll lay it out on the table, neat like a solitaire deck, but now - why, you can't find all the cards.