First, I'll kill the dog with kindness, and if that doesn't work, I'll just kill him.

If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly.

The arts are the only things that separate us from the other animals. The arts are not decorative. ... They are essential to our comprehension of consciousness and ourselves.

Sometimes it's necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.

Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.

You're alive only once, as far as we know, and what could be worse than getting to the end of your life and realizing you hadn't lived it?

You gotta have swine to show you where the truffles are.

One must let the play happen to one; one must let the mind loose to respond as it will, to receive impressions, to sense rather than know, to gather rather than immediately understand.

School curricula that ignore the arts produce highly educated Barbarians

The well of your soul will not experience the drought until in front of her will appear the moment of eternity to drink from the water of death.

There's a reason my only friends are written words

We have lied to ourselves. We have not built this box for the good of our brothers. We built it for its own sake. It is above all our brothers to us, and its truth above their truth.

The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.

Excitement always leads to tears.

I had an amazing childhood, lots of love. But my dad worked his tail off, getting up at 4 in the morning and going off at 5, 6 o'clock, yet he always had time to spend with his kids and his wife.

A meaningful conceptual basis is always more important than vivid photographs, and vice versa.

I don't count myself as a fashionista because I do a lot of other things. That's just a small part of my life.

Being a skeptic just means being rational and empirical: thinking and seeing before believing.

We need to act and act now to get people out of harm's way.