Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

What people really want in the theater is fantasy involvement and not reality involvement.

I write to find out what I’m talking about.

You’re alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it?

I have a fine sense of the ridiculous, but no sense of humor.

It’s one of those things a person has to do; sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.

What could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn’t lived it

I said I was impressed, Martha. I’m beside myself with jealousy. What do you want me to do, throw up?

Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.

I think there are perhaps four playwrights of the 20th century that we could not have done without: Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht and Beckett. If you’ve got those four, you’ve got the century covered.

In my mind, Martha, you are buried in cement right up to your neck. No… right up to your nose… that’s much quieter.

Martha: Truth or illusion, George; you don’t know the difference.George: No, but we must carry on as though we did.Martha: Amen.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he’d be a drama critic.

A play is fiction-and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

Martha: Oh, I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most. Your anger.

The thing that makes a creative person is to be creative and that is all there is to it.

What I wanted to get at is the value difference between pornographic playing-cards when you’re a kid, and pornographic playing-cards when you’re older. It’s that when you’re a kid you use the cards as a...

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

I swear, if you existed I’d divorce you.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I am not interested in living in a city where there isn’t a production by Samuel Beckett running.

Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve.

Oh, Mother, you go home too early!

The Theatre of the Absurd, in the sense that it is truly the contemporary theatre, facing as it does man’s condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and that the supposed...

American critics are like American universities. They both have dull and half-dead faculties.

that my plays were ‘necessary.’ I will go one step further and say that Arthur’s plays are ‘essential.’

Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

I’ve never seen it staged or on film, but the story is so intense that I could feel the adrenaline running through my body while reading it. There’s this chest-tightening anxiety of being thrown into...

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

I’m not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I’m rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

He’s a splendid writer and a good political activist. I can’t think of a better choice.

A play is fiction – and fiction is fact distilled into truth.

The difference between critics and audiences is that one is a group of humans and one is not.

It’s hard to explain, or even remember, it now. All four of them were down there underwater, but it’s too complicated to go into. I thought it was better just to eliminate it. If it...