Mendacity is a system that we live in,” declares Brick. “Liquor is one way out an’death’s the other.

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

It’s interesting, isn’t it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.

life has got to be allowed to continue even after the dream of life is-all-over.

There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you...

El objetivo de su vida, desde su adolescencia, es el placer con las mujeres, que da y recibe, no con indulgente ligereza sino con el orgulloso poder de un gallo de buen plumaje en un...

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

People go to the movies instead of moving.

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...

When something is Festering on your memory or in your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that...

To begin with, I turn back time. I reverse it to that quaint period, the thirties, when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. Their eyes had failed...

The little comfort of love?-Is that comfort so little?-Caged birds accept each other but flight is what they long for.

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...

We have to distrust each other. It is our only defence against betrayal.

The scene is memory and is therefore nonrealistic. 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...

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

When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.

All cruel people describe themselves as paragons of frankness.

When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.

When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.

Sí, todos nos necesitamos mutuamente, y eso es lo que consideramos amor… Y el no necesitarse unos a otros es… el odio.

We have to distrust each other. It’s our only defense against betrayal.

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see …each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition– all such distortions within our own egos–...

I’ll tell you what I want. Magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misinterpret things to them. I don’t tell the truth. I tell what ought to be truth. And...

I’ve got the guts to die. What I want to know is, have you got the guts to live?

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...

I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.

I know! WHY! – Am I so catty? – Cause I’m consumed with envy an’ eaten up with longing? –

You’ll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!

CORNELIA: -Sit down. Don’t leave the table.GRACE: -Is that an order?CORNELIA: -I don’t give orders to you, I make requests.GRACE: -Sometimes the requests of an employer are hard to distinguish from orders. [She sits down]

In human character, simplicity doesn’t exist except among simpletons.

Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you...

Laws of silence don’t work….When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope...

Time is the longest distance between two places.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting...

The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of. Because other people are not such wonderful people. They’re one hundred times one thousand. You’re one times one!...

Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter.

The theatre is a place where one has time for the problems of people to whom one would show the door if they came to one’s office for a job.

Unattached and aimless, these old men are always infatuated with little certainties and regularities such as those that ordered the life of Mr. Krupper as seen from outside. Habit is living. Anything unexpected reminds them...

…the human animal is a selfish beast…

Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.

Well, sooner or later, at some point in your life, the thing that you lived for is lost or abandoned, and then … you die, or find something else.

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

Byron: The luxuries of this place have made me soft.The metal point’s gone from my pen, there’s nothing left but the feather.Gutman:That may be true.But what can you do about it?Byron:Make a departure.Gutman:From yourself?Byron:From my...

Chance, you’ve gone past something you couldn’t afford to go past; your time, your youth, you’ve passed it. It’s all you had and you’ve had it.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

The human animal is a beast that dies and if he’s got money he buys and buys and buys and I think the reason he buys everything he can buy is that in the back...

What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof?—I wish I knew… Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can…

He was always running or bounding, never just walking. He seemed always at the point of defeating the law of gravity.

You can be young without money, but you can’t be old without it.