It always seems to me better to slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of privacy - the kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself.

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

The sun can shine, and it can burn. You can shine your love with a softer power than the sun.

All that God is, will supply your need.

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

Success is man's god.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

Love has so many unique yet consistent forms.

I'm just tired; I just want the world to be quiet for a bit.

Be inwardly ever newly joyous, like the ever-fresh laughing waters of a gurgling brook.

If we do not let people do things the way they do, we will never know what they are really capable of and they will just follow our boarding school rules.