It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.

If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama.

I'm too old to recover, too narrow to forgive myself.

It is best to act with confidence, no matter how little right you have to it.

Failure in the theater is more dramatic and uglier than any other form of writing. It costs so much, you feel so guilty.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

It was an unspoken pleasure, that having come together so many years, ruined so much and repaired a little, we had endured.