Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

When people discuss his plays, he says that he feels like he's standing at customs watching an official ransack his luggage. He cheerfully declares responsibility for a play about two people, and suddenly the officer is finding all manner of exotic contraband like the nature of God and identity, and while he can't deny that they're there, he can't for the life of him remember putting them there. In the end, a play is not the product of an idea; an idea is the product of a play.

I'm a very boring person.

It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God.

James Joyce - an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognized.