Read the great stuff, but read the stuff that isn't so great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams for Western Union.

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

Nixon’s offences had been so long in the past, so much part of a different era that he now seemed like some lovable but bigoted uncle you tolerated at Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Wolves travel in packs, not in herds.

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.

I am going to give my psychoanalyst one more year then I'm going to Lourdes.

The world changes fast, and a lot of the old country folks have a hard time keeping up with it, and it makes them sad.

You know, businesses hate uncertainty more than anything else.

You can become blind by seeing each day as a similar one.

I was interested in the environment from when I was a little kid. I spent most of my time hunting and fishing and kayaking.

It's traumatizing for me to come to Washington during a Republican administration because I don't have any Republican clothes.

If I want to ban any newspaper, I will, with good reason.