The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

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.

You did not just say that. I have a feeling we're on the verge of hugging and coming up with cute nicknames for each other.

He loved her with the fire of a thousand suns, she was his solace in the chaos, his redemption.

There is no humility in calling yourself a Christian

Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.

You have countries like India that have tried to help untouchables, with essentially affirmative-action programs, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the structure of their societies.

Ive never had any interest at all in being a journalist or writing some sort of historically accurate autobiography.

It's all happening too fast. I've got to put the brakes on or I'll smack into something.

Hope is not found in a way out but a way through.

I think these are terrible times to be anything in.

Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don't stop at a nation's borders.