The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.
A suicide kills two people, Maggie, that's what it's for!
You specialize in something until one day you find it is specializing in you.
All we are is a lot of talking nitrogen.
Without alienation, there can be no politics.
He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.
If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.
I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime.
I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
If I see an ending, I can work backward.
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?
What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.
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 closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.
Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act.
The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.
