Quote collection
219 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If a person measures his spiritual fulfillment in terms of cosmic visions, surpassing peace of mind, or ecstasy, then he is not likely to know much spiritual fulfillment. If, however, he measures it in terms of enjoying a sunrise, being warmed by a child's smile, or being able to help someone have a better day, then he is likely to know much spiritual fulfillment."
"I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget."
"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."
"Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets."
"I’m a writer, and everything I write is both a confession and a struggle to understand things about myself and this world in which I live. This is what everyone’s work should be-whether you dance or paint or sing. It is a confession, a baring of your soul, your faults, those things you simply cannot or will not understand or accept. You stumble forward, confused, and you share. If you’re lucky, you learn something."
"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, I spent six or seven years after high school trying to work myself up. Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. And it's a measly manner of existence. To get on that subway on the hot mornings in summer. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella. And still — that's how you build a future."
"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."
"No one wants the truth if it is inconvenient."
"A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse."
"The writer must be in it; he can't be to one side of it, ever. He has to be endangered by it. His own attitudes have to be tested in it. The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing himself, always."
"Betrayal is the only truth that sticks."
"Work a lifetime to pay off a house You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it."
"...When the government goes into the business of destroying trust, it goes into the business of destroying itself."