“Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”
“Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.”
“The job is to ask questions—it always was—and to ask them as inexorably as I can.”
“I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget.”
“A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.”
“I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human.”
“The fish is in the water, and the water is in the fish. You can’t understand a man unless you understand his environment.”
“I know you’re no worse than most men, but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”
“An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.”
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
“The closer a man approaches tragedy, the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment.”
“When the guns roar, the arts die.”
“A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can’t live that way, you don’t stay.”
“The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it’s so accidental. It’s so much like life.”
“Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s no one to live in it.”
“A man’s gotta know what he stands for, or he stands for nothing.”
“Without alienation, there can be no politics.”
“I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.”
“If I see an ending, I can work backward.”
“You can quicker get back a million dollars that was stolen than a word that you gave away.”
“You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit.”
“A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”
“I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.”
“What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum?”
“The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.”
“I think tragedy has to do with a man’s struggle to take responsibility for himself.”
“Attention must be paid.”
“A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance—you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke.”
“A suicide kills two people: that’s what it’s for.”
“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.”
“The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order.”
“I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play—but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem.”
“The problem was that the things he wished for were so modest that they stood a better chance of not being granted.”
“In the theater, you have to be able to see an event unfold and never be able to see it again.”
“The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of it.”
“The measure of the artist is the length to which he will go in order to be true to his own character.”
“There’s nothing more human than to say what needs to be said.”
“The world is an oyster, but you don’t crack it open on a mattress.”
“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”
“I cannot conceive of any writer who has no moral stance whatsoever.”
“The thing that shook me profoundly as a young man was the certainty that there is no hope for a society which does not create a theater that affects the heart and the soul.”
“You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.”
“I think the mission of the artist is to bring back into the world the idea that there is justice.”
“You don’t make peace with others, you make peace with yourself.”
“The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge.”
“When people are dying, they know everything.”
“What is not remembered never happened.”
“The human animal has evolved as a social being, not as an isolated entity.”
“The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.”
“The best place to start is with the truth.”