Work a lifetime to pay off a house. you finally own it, and there's nobody to live in it.

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.

Paradise is a state of being, more than just the name of a suburb or a home.

I dont think you ever get tired of the well-written, well-crafted songs.

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

Twenty years ago many chemists would have defended the theory of bond arms as a satisfactory explanation because they had become accustomed to thinking of it as unique and as ultimate.

You have to watch out with my plays. They're like yeast. You think they're one thing, then all of a sudden subtext gets to working.

...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.

A nothing day full of wild beauty .... Little fish stream by, a river in water.

The real gift of gratitude is that the more grateful you are, the more present you become.

London was a really multi-racial city ... It's incredible how comfortable people are with race there.

Peace, that glorious moment in time when everyone stops and reloads.