I have learned that neither kindness or cruelty by themselves, or independent of each other, create any effect beyond themselves.

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

If you listen to the wind very carefully, you'll be able to hear me whisper my love for you.

Black and white is refuge of colors from their own nullity.

Pain wastes the Body, Pleasures the Understanding.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can't deal with except by force

Sometimes I'm not nice for a reason. It's a way to find out what someone's made of.

I was happy to kind of always scoot under the radar.

I know there's bands that might write something that sounds like The Smiths, and they'll go, 'Oh, it sounds like The Smiths, we've got to make it sound not like The Smiths.'

I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it.

Winter is not an end. It is in transit. It is headed to bankruptcy. The sheriff will sell its stock for what he can get and an ice man will be the only bidder at the sale.