The Venus flytrap, a devouring organism, aptly named for the goddess of love.

Make this decision today. Will you be a good and honest writer, or would you rather be famous, loved, noticed? Tell me, because there are different paths for these two divergent goals. The decision to be a true artist is lonelier and slower, but it will lead to better work and, I think, a better life. Very rarely you will be a good and honest writer and also know a little comfort and some attention and the well wishes of a crowd. This is very rare.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.

Living with someone you love can be lonelier than living entirely alone, if the on that you love doesn't love you.

Switch clicking off in my head, turning the hot light off and the cool night on and — [He looks up, smiling sadly.] — all of a sudden there's—peace!

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry.