Since that day, when people have spoken to me of "genius", I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.

Q.Do you have any positive message, in your opinion? A.Indeed I do think that I do. Q.Such as what? A.The crying, almost screaming, need of a great worldwide human effort to know ourselves and each other a great deal better, well enough to concede that no man has a monopoly on right or virtue any more than any man has a corner on duplicity and evil and so forth. If people, and races and nations, would start with that self-manifest truth, then I think that the world could sidestep the sort of corruption which I have involuntarily chosen as the basic, allegorical theme of my plays as a whole.

What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?

People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them.

We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.