Quotes

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.

Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

It can take a long time to accept that celebrity is a kind of loneliness.

[on being told by Elia Kazan that he would testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities] Listening to him I grew frightened. There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying: unless he came clean he could never hope, in the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America, and he would probably not be given a passport to work abroad, either. If the theatre remained open to him, it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay, and he had been told in so many words by his old boss and friend Spyros P. Skouras, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the Committee. I could only say that I thought this would pass and that it had to pass because it would devour the glue that kept the country together if left to its own unobstructed course. I said that it was not the Reds who were dispensing our fears now, but the other side, and it could not go indefinitely, it would someday wear down the national nerve. And then there might be regrets about this time. But I was growing cooler with the thought that as unbelievable as it seemed, I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I attended meetings of the Communist Party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them. - from his autobiography "Timebends" (1989)

[on why he was called to testify by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956] I knew perfectly well why they had subpoenaed me. It was because I was engaged to Marilyn Monroe. Had I not been, they'd never have thought of me. They'd been through the writers long before and they'd never touched me. Once I became famous as her possible husband, this was a great possibility for publicity. When I got to Washington, preparing to appear before that committee, my lawyer received a message from the chairman saying that if it could be arranged that he could have a picture, a photograph taken with Marilyn, he would cancel the whole hearing. I mean, the cynicism of this thing was so total, it was asphyxiating.

The task of the real intellectual consists of analyzing illusions in order to discover their causes.

Once when my father was about eighty he asked me, 'Do I look like you or do you look like me?' This was serious. 'I guess I look like you,' I said. He seemed to like that answer.

My father loved to stand in front of a theater where a play of mine was on and every now and then stroll in to chat with the box office men about business.

[on Marilyn Monroe] If she was simple, it would have been easy to help her. She could have made it with a little luck.

[on his play "After the Fall"] The best of our theater is standing on tiptoe, striving to see over the shoulders of father and mother. The worst is exploiting and wallowing in the self-pity of adolescence and obsessive keyhole sexuality. The way out, as the poet says, is always through.

[on approaches to acting] 'The Method' is in the air. The actor is defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in 'After the Fall' I couldn't hear. I kept on saying, 'I can't hear you'. She finally got furious and said to me, in effect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not going to prostitute herself to the audience. That was the living end.

[on working in radio with Orson Welles] I was amazed at Welles's genius with the microphone; he seemed to climb into it, his word-carving voice winding into one's brain. No actor had such intimacy and sheer presence in a loudspeaker.

[on William Saroyan] ...the first to let it all hang out, the first to cast aside social and psychological considerations and to write like a child in wonderland...

[on Mihail Sebastian's "Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years", first published in 1996] This book is alive, a human soul lives in it, along with the unfolding ghastliness of the last century, which passed an inch away from Sebastian's nose. His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candor, and subtleness of observation. Here is a life, and an absurd death, whose spell will last a long time.

[on Al Hirschfeld] Looking at a Hirschfeld drawing of yourself is the best thing for tired blood.

I cannot write anything that I understand too well. If I know what something means to me, if I have already come to the end of it as an experience, I can't write it because it seems a twice-told tale. I have to astonish myself, and that of course is a very costly way of going about things.

The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment - which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism.

I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human - which is to say, less alone.

I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act. (1954)

Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

The job is to ask questions — it always was — and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

But what is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

It is always and forever the same struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to be borne. ... much more reassuring to see the world in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about us. At all costs, never disturb our innocence.

There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad. (1963)

On his character Willy Loman in "Death of a Saleman" : I understand his longing for immortality ... Willy's writing his name in a cake of ice on a hot day, but he wishes he were writing in stone. He wants to live on through something — and in his case, his masterpiece is his son... all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world.

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down.... the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day. (1966)

Once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.

On his play "The Crucible": I was very moved by that play once again when the Royal Shakespeare Company did a production that toured the cathedrals of England. Then they took it to Poland and performed it in the cathedrals there, too. The actors said it changed their lives. Officials wept; they were speechless after the play, and everyone knew why. It was because they had to enforce the kind of repression the play was attacking. That made me prouder than anything I ever did in my life.

If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that. (1988)

On his play "The Crucible": I can almost tell what the political situation in a country is when the play is suddenly a hit there — it is either a warning of tyranny on the way or a reminder of tyranny just past.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write ... were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

A playwright lives in an occupied country... And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

On tragedy: Even the dictionary says nothing more about the word than that it means a story with a sad or unhappy ending. This impression is so firmly fixed that I almost hesitate to claim that in truth tragedy implies more optimism in its author than does comedy, and that its final result ought to be the reinforcement of the onlooker's brightest opinions of the human animal.

Tragedy enlightens — and it must, in that it points the heroic finger at the enemy of man's freedom.

It is time, I think, that we who are without kings, took up this bright thread of our history and followed it to the only place it can possibly lead in our time — the heart and spirit of the average man.

Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.

in essence the tragic hero is intent upon claiming his whole due as a personality, and if this struggle must be total and without reservation, then it automatically demonstrates the indestructible will of man to achieve his humanity.

The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.