The most fatal illusion is the narrow point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

The virtue of the camera is not the power it has to transform the photographer into an artist, but the impulse it gives him to keep on looking

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

As thought it is a contribution to public knowledge. As drama it is vivid and bold.

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know.

Ethel Waters, the flaming tower of dusky regality, who knows how to make a song stand on tiptoe.

Good plays drive bad playgoers crazy.

In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction...

There is no joy so great as that of reporting that a good play has come to town.

The evil that men do lives on the front pages of greedy newspapers, but the good is oft interred apathetically inside

The most fatal illusion is the settled point of view. Since life is growth and motion, a fixed point of view kills anybody who has one.

Every man with an idea has at least two or three followers

When Mr. Wilbur calls his play ‘Halfway to Hell,’ he underestimates the distance.

In every age ‘the good old days’ were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived...

I have no objections to churches so long as they do not interfere with God’s work

In every age “the good old days” were a myth. No one ever thought they were good at the time. For every age has consisted of crises that seemed intolerable to the people who lived...

Don’t be condescending to unskilled labor. Try it for a half a day first.

The only important thing a writer needs is a subject. What the reader hungers after is not accomplished craftsmanship nor even correct grammar but a frank report of the things a writer has done, seen,...

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past. Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.

The cocktail party… is a device either for getting rid of social obligations hurriedly en masse or for making overtures toward more serious social relationships, as in the etiquette of whoring.

After each war there is a little less democracy to save.

Nothing a man writes can please him as profoundly as something he does with his back, shoulders and hands. For writing is an artificial activity. It is a lonely and private substitute for conversation.

It seems not to have been written. It is the quintessence of life. It is the basic truth.

The Blonde in the Thunderbird