You must make your own blunders, must cheerfully accept your own mistakes as part of the scheme of things.

Among the most disheartening and dangerous of . . . advisors, you will often find those closest to you, your dearest friends, members of your own family, perhaps, loving, anxious, and knowing nothing whatever . . .

Go into the streets, into the slums, into the fashionable quarters. Go into the day courts and the night courts. Become acquainted with sorrow, with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible generosity of the very poor

Idealistic producing is safe. Sensibly projected in the theater, the fine thing always does pay and always will.

As soon as I suspect a fine effect is being achieved by accident I lose interest. I am not interested...in unskilled labor. ...The scientific actor is an even worker. Any one may achieve on some rare occasion an outburst of genuine feeling, a gesture of imperishable beauty, a ringing accent of truth; but your scientific actor knows how he did it. He can repeat it again and again and again. He can be depended on.

People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Many a play is like a painted backdrop, something to be looked at from the front. An Ibsen play is like a black forest, somethingyou can enter, something you can walk about in. There you can lose yourself: you can lose yourself. And once inside, you find such wonderful glades, such beautiful, sunlit places.