Quotes

During the middle 60s, when I wrote 'Little Murders' I was in a mood of black despair about the country and where we were going. I thought the Vietnam War was going to go on for the rest of my life and my daughter's. The left was crumbling and what part of it wasn't was a pain in the rear. I felt terribly old and very bitter about the future of this country and my future in it.

Back then I almost always began a play as an essay. I had in mind what I wanted to say, then created the characters and the situations to say it. I tried to make those characters as real as possible within their bizarre situations. In 'Knock, Knock', for the first time, I was tired of doing thesis plays. I simply wanted to have a good time. I was worn out by evangelizing. I must have made the assumption that there was no point in exposing further. Everybody knew everything already, everyone knew how bad it was, you couldn't disturb or shock or create new discontent because there there was so much old discontent that still hadn't been absorbed. The point now is to start working out ways of living a life within all this.

There's such a snobbery about cartoons. Once the plays were out, the assumption was that I would drop the cartoon. The more I write plays, the more important the cartoon becomes.The plays,in a way, are a form of self indulgence. If you ask which is more socially useful on a broad-based level, then it's probably the cartoon.

[on Robert Evans and "Popeye", 1980]: From my experience with him, he takes risks. He's highly supportive of the people he works with, very loyal and very moving in that way. I just find the kind of support he's given me, earlier when Dustin [Hoffman] wanted me off the picture, and then with Altman, rare and impressive, to say the least.

I want to write about marriage. I think the most interesting story is how men and women get on with each other, the terms they accept to live together and survive together, the compromises they make, the betrayals of themselves and of each other, and how, despite the fact that over and over again they find that it can't possibly work, it still seems to be preferable to anything else they know about. In the end, it becomes rather heroic. (September 1971)

[1998, on Al Hirschfeld] The only glamour left in the theater is what Al brings to it. And he is to what he does what Astaire was to what he did. Al has the same effortlessness, the same grace, the same wit, and that lighter-than-air quality.

Getting up in the morning is an act of false confidence.