When any creativity becomes useful, it is sucked into the vortex of commercialism, and when a thing becomes commercial, it becomes the enemy of man.

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.

It's no use crying over spilt milk, because all of the forces of the universe were bent on spilling it.

Although personal calling I sense, Who am I? even if I am, I don't know.

If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.

Pay close attention to any flame of enthusiasm.

A man's life of any worth is a continual allegory.

Gratitude takes three forms: a feeling in the heart, an expression in words, and a giving in return.

I know that DER SPIEGEL is a respected magazine. But I don't know whether it is possible for you to publish the truth about the Holocaust. Are you permitted to write everything about it?

Hurdling, sprinting, athletics in general, is always in the back of your mind.

Ammunition beats persuasion when you are looking for freedom.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.