If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.

Hope is not a feeling of certainty that everything ends well. Hope is just a feeling that life and work have a meaning.

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.

Courage means going against majority opinion in the name of the truth.

There is only one Art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. ... Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

It lies in human nature that where you experience your first laughs, you also remember the age kindly.

Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to prosecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.