The greatest films are those which show how society shapes man. The greatest plays are those which show how man shapes society.

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced; and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland.

No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.

Pearl is a disease of oysters. Levant is a disease of Hollywood.

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

Western man, especially the Western critic, still find it very had to go into print and say: "I recommend you to go and see this because it gave me an erection."