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.

No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient.

To cherish perfection is to commit creative suicide, and every true artist knows that a masterpiece is an accident that should be burned.

A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.

Dancers don’t think about things; they just do them.

You see only the beautiful things when you stand still. You only see things that you don't ordinarily notice. The birds are the prettiest things, I imagine.

It is not fitting that the evil produced by men should be imputed to things; let those bear the blame who make an ill use of things in themselves good.

Even when I'm being funny, I'm deadly serious.

I am a coach on the outside of the establishment and that works.

Where there is no truth there is no grace.

I hold the precepts of Jesus as delivered by Himself, to be the most pure, benevolent and sublime which have ever been preached to man.