A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being.

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of a whole city.

If a man has no vices, he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.

Ninety-nine per cent of people in the world are fools, and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.

There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.