Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

If you can't be yourself, what's the point of being anyone else?

Mendacity is a system that we live in," declares Brick. "Liquor is one way out an'death's the other.

William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

Sorrow makes for sincerity, I think.

Oh, Jacques, we're used to each other, we're a pair of captive hawks caught in the same cage, and so we've grown used to each other. That's what passes for love at this dim, shadowy end of the Camino Real.