Quote collection
219 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it."
"I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead."
"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime."
"A play's an interpretation. It is not a report. And that is the beginning of its poetry because, in order to interpret, you have to distort toward a symbolic construction of what happened, and as that distortion takes place, you begin to leave out and overemphasize and consequently deliver up life as a unity rather than as a chaos, and any such attempt, the more intense it is, the more poetic it becomes."
"A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay."
"When the guns roar, the arts die."
"A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about."
"The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone."
"Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?"
"The car, the furniture, the wife, the children - everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is - shopping."
"The Greeks used to use the same stories, the same mythology, time after time, different authors. There was no premium placed upon an original story, and indeed, Shakespeare likewise. A lot of people wrote plays about great kings. They didn't expect a brand-new story. It was what that new author made of the old story. It is probably the same now. We disguise it by inventing what seem to be new stories, but they're basically the same story anyway."
"Willie was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to life?. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake."
"I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act."
"A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man."
"After all the highways, and the trains, and the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive."
"He's liked, but he's not well liked."
"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."
"Be liked and you will never want."
"The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that."
"Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line."