I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, [so] I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

The room has to be comfortable; the house has to look habitable.

In Cuba we are building a socialist society and we could say we are on the verge of a communist society which is hard to achieve, very hard to achieve, but is a longing worth fighting for.

People are always going to, you know, find something wrong with people who are not the exact same as them. That's just what it is. Black, white, short, tall, religions, whatever. People are bad.

I couldn't do rap. I was trying. I don't know how. I'm not good enough to know.

Maturity comes not with age but with the acceptance of responsibility. You are only young once but immaturity can last a lifetime!

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

Dance is the pure language of the soul - it's been with us from the very beginning.

As important as shared memories is the silent agreement that certain things never happened.