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.

But nothing happened there now of a nature to provoke a disturbance. There were no complaints to the management or the police, and the dark glory of the upper galleries was a legend in such...

Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.–Blanche Dubois

It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn’t a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who...

Of course, you were crowned with laurel in the beginning, your gold hair was wreathed with laurel, but the gold is thinning and the laurel has withered. Face it – pitiful monster.

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

Somebody said once or wrote, once: ‘We’re all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God’s name with the wrong alphabet blocks!

The panic disappeared under those soothing old fingers and the breathing slowed down and stopped hurting the chest as if a fox was caught in it, and then at last Mr. Kroger began to lecture...

…human beings dream of life everlasting. But most of them want it on earth and not in heaven.

Has it ever struck you that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going?

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

Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.

Time doesn’t take away from friendship, nor does separation.

…love, all at once and much, much too completely. It’s like you suddenly turn a blinding light on something that had always been half a shadow…

This was a respect in which he paid due homage to the wise old spirit of the late Emiel Kroger, that romantically practical Teuton who used to murmur to Pablo, between sleeping and waking, a...

You have a spark of anarchy in your spirit and that’s not to be tolerated. Nothing wild or honest is tolerated her! It has to be extinguished…

Possess your soul in patience – you will see!

I don’t believe in “original sin.” I don’t believe in “guilt.” I don’t believe in villains or heroes – only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or...

Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.

The apartment faces an alley and is entered by a fire-escape, a structure whose name is a touch of accidental poetic truth, for all of these huge buildings are always burning with the slow and...

In the course of this story, and very soon now, it will be necessary to make some disclosures about Mr. Krupper of a nature too coarse to be dealt with very directly in a work...

One man has one great true thing in his life. One great good thing that is true!

I go to the movies because – I like adventure. Adventure is something I don’t have much of at work, so I go to the movies.