All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'.

Without vanity a writer's work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.

I have had the irreplaceable opportunity of learning my profession with the proper tools, the most important of which is not a pencil or a typewriter, but the necessary time to think before using them.

How many of us would be willing to settle when we're young for what we eventually get? All those plans we make...what happens to them? It's only a handful of the lucky ones that can look back and say that they even came close.

Boredom is the keynote of poverty — of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with — for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine. To be able to break out of its dark brown sameness.

The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.

Charity in the theatre usually begins and ends with people who have a play opening the week following one's own. Their unlikely benevolence is not so much a purity of heart as the knowledge that they face a firing line with rifles aimed in exactly the same direction.