Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own.

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

Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.

Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

A too constant preoccupation with money may seem to indicate the lack of a proper sense of moral values, but [let] those who have always had money . . . be without it for a while, and they will soon discover how quickly it becomes their chief concern.

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.

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.