My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.

I was an accomplice in my own frustration.

What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?

Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.

I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.

Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.

Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.

Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.

I dreamt of worldly success once.

Rhetorical question: Did you get to where you are by accepting the status quo?I didn't.

Realism is knowing fantasy and reality intersect constantly. Realism is living with the awareness that every act changes the world.

Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

The most famous Obama precept is, 'No drama.'

As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.

I think the major role of the First Lady is to take care of the President so that he can best serve the people. And not to fail her family, her husband, and children.

What is success? I think it is a mixture of having a flair for the thing that you are doing; knowing that it is not enough, that you have got to have hard work and a certain sense of purpose.

I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad.