Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

People shouldn't trust artists and they shouldn't trust art. Part of the fun of art is that it invites you to interpret it.

I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.

In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we've left behind, and dreaming ahead.

I tend to be sort of quiet and shy and awkward in social situations.

Torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.

The white cracker who wrote the National Anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word "free" to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

You have a strange relationship with calamity when you're a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that's a creepy thing to do.

Holiness leads to wholeness and wholeness leads to happiness.

Wynn picked up the note, unfolded it, and read aloud. "'Call Wynnie-the-Pooh. Out of salt. Important. Dig on Coleman, Garvey/CG Towers, Uncle Griffin. Paris. Bank for box.

Good storytellers are always ready for the next question.

Back before I injured my hip, I thought going to the gym was for wimps.

We have made a great effort to maintain all levels of Buddhist education; it has helped us have a kind of renaissance, really.

For the body at best Is a bundle of aches, Longing for rest; It cries when it wakes.

I still care for you, you know.. That phrase again. Everyone cares for me. They just don't know how to love me.

Wringin' your hands only stops you from rollin' up your sleeves.

American Hustle shows the FBI making real-life bribes to Washington politicians. I know, because as your U.S. senator, I turned them down.

But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also the law of the human mind?