"Youth is wasted on the young."
"Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid."
"I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play."
"When I start a book, it's every day. There is no Saturday, no Sunday. It's every day, because if I stop one day, I'm afraid of losing the book and losing the energy."
"America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between."
"One has to confront history honestly."
"At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past."
"Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing."
"It is easily and often overlooked that when Thomas Jefferson asserted that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were inalienable human rights, he did so on the ground that they had been endowed by God, our Creator."
"I take every possible side."
"The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries."
"The world is chaos. Nothingness is the yet-to-be-born god of the world."
"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."
"A merely fallen enemy may rise again, but the reconciled one is truly vanquished."
"The key to education is the experience of beauty."
"A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author."
"Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theater. But, whatever happens, I am grateful to have had my novice work received so well, and so quickly."
"Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability."
"I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial."
"Your whole life is on the other side of the glass. And there is nobody watching."
"That's all that counts. People being sorry. Makes you feel better; gives you a sense of dignity, and that's all that's important; a sense of dignity. And it doesn't matter if you don't care or not, either. You got to have a sense of dignity, even if you don't care, 'cause, if you don't have that, civilization's doomed."
"Lonely people, in talking to each other, can make each other lonelier."
"One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers."
"Joy is a subtle elf; I think one's happiest when he forgets himself."
"Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering."