What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it

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

No holy book is more inspired than the other. They are all inspired according to their gods.

You have no idea how long a year is until you’re stone sober.

One must not speak of such things. One is still scarred from that experience.

I tell people that stand-up's like golf: you gotta do it every day to get it down - or at least three times a week to get it down.

Whenever possible, the left and the Democrats have de-stigmatized irresponsible behavior.

I was not an activist.

Life marches by, I suggest you get on with it.

If you believe you can only go so far, it is an obstacle.

People often talk about me as a singer, but they don't often talk about you when you're a woman as a songwriter.

This is how I understand literature - as a kind of remix or echo chamber. What's going on in a literary work are other literary things disinterred, cannibalized, and recombined.