The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.

The theater, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.

Men go to the theatre to forget; women, to remember.

He was done with tinsel and sawdust, he declaimed; he wanted no more of the theater and its cutthroat machinations.

A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror.

The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.