"I hope I never need to believe in God. It would be an awful confession of failure."

“Welles is at once as abnormal and as natural as Niagara Falls.”

“I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not indulge in the luxury of "privileged despair.”

“I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word "fuck" is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.”

“No theater could sanely flourish until there was an umbilical connection between what was happening on the stage and what was happening in the world.”

“When you've seen all of Ionesco's plays, I felt at the end, you've seen one of them.”

“Her style looks absurdly simple — an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable.”