A lot of your personality is formed before you're 12, obviously, but only a few of my plays use characters from my childhood. The more mature plays are affected only by my adult experiences.

If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet.

If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

Talent is the gift plus the passion - a desire to succeed so intense that no force on earth can stop it.

Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity.

Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity.

It's always painful when you're writing memoirs because you've got to go through the dark places, but it gives you a chance to find out the person you really are, not the person you thought you were.

Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples.

I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far.

Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of meditation- an investigation of my own life.

I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud.

Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had. You will want suddenness, Doctor.

One afternoon, when I was four years old, my father came home, and he found me in the living room in front of a roaring fire, which made him very angry. Because we didn't have a fireplace.

We put ourselves through hell and that is hell.

Yet I am not writing with ordinary ink, but with red blood that dripsfrom my heart. All its wounds long scarred over have opened and itthrobs and hurts, and now and then a tear falls on the paper.

Being loud after drinking wine doesn't help. Being silent after drinking wine doesn't help. Nothing really ever gets solved either way.

I lost my freedom for so many years. Until he entered my cage. Him, with the black eyes and blacker soul.

We fail far more often by timidity than by over-daring.

Our sacrifice is greater than his," cried Rilla passionately. "Our boys give only themselves. We give them.

When God wants to speak and deal with us, he does not avail himself of an angel but of parents, or the pastor, or of our neighbor.

I think we're socialized out of being women, and then we have to find our way back to it. That's hard to do.