Great Throughts Treasury

"I am standing like shoe polish on an overstocked shelf hoping that one day someone will pick me to make things better."

"I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected."

"I cannot write any sort of story unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire."

"I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself."

"I didn't go to the moon, I went much further—for time is the longest distance between two places."

"I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all."

"Hysteria is a natural phenomenon, the common denominator of the female nature. It's the big female weapon, and the test of a man is his ability to cope with it."

"How sad a thing for an artist to abandon his art: I think it's much sadder than death ..."

"How beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken."

"I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for."

"I have always been pushed by the negative. The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night, before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success."

"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really."

"I don't think a married couple can go through life without laughs together any more than they can without tears."

"I don't mean what other people mean when they speak of a home, because I don't regard a home as a ... well, as a place, a building ... a house ... of wood, bricks, stone. I think of a home as being a thing that two people have between them in which each can ... well, nest."

"I get melancholy if I don't write. I need the company of people who don't exist."

"I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

"I don't want realism. I want magic Yes, yes, magic I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it"

"I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency."

"I know all about the tyranny of women."

"I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together"

"I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block."

"I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding."

"I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything, anything I ever did, I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion."

"If I am no longer disturbed myself, I will deal less with disturbed people, but I don't regret having concerned myself with them because I think most of us are disturbed."

"If I got rid of my demons, I'd lose my angels."

"If I kill off all my demons my angels might die as well."

"If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it."

"If you re goin through he'll.. Keep goin!! You always grow through what you go through."

"If I'm not back in ten minutes... just wait longer."

"I'm not living with you. We occupy the same cage."

"I'm a poet. And then I put the poetry in the drama. I put it in short stories, and I put it in the plays. Poetry's poetry. It doesn't have to be called a poem, you know."

"In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness."

"It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses."

"It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant."

"It's not even about being negative. It's just being unsettled, unsatisfied, unfinished."

"I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."

"Kill all my demons, and my angels might die too."

"Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going."

"Lead them beside still waters because you know how badly they need still waters."

"Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose."

"Love is a very difficult -- occupation. You got to work at it, man. It ain't a thing every Tom, Dick and Harry has got a true aptitude for."

"Luck is believing you’re lucky."

"Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is."

"Life is important. There's nothing else to hold on onto."

"Maggie, we're through with lies and liars in this house. Lock the door."

"Make voyages! Attempt them . . . there's nothing else."

"Marriage is an economic arrangement in many ways, let's face it."

"Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the warehouse!"

"Maybe they weren't punks at all, but New York drama critics."

"Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominately in the heart."