A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.

I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

Grief would weave itself among the threads of love and life and hope, and I was starting to believe that what came of it all would still one day be beautiful.

Don't date anyone you can't see yourself marrying.

Now I lay me down to cheat on the woman I love so, and if I die between these sheets I pray to God she'll never know.

Direct threats require decisive action.

Writing eases my suffering . . . writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

I don't get to watch a lot of TV. I just do all my news and reading and "Meet the Press," all that fun, exciting stuff.

Easy for you to say. You’re the one who got plowed. I was doing the plowing.

Without promotion, something terrible happens... nothing!

We'll try and be very aggressive, we'll try and speed up and change gears, and we'll see who's going to win.

Art can sometimes be separate from the artist.