The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

The dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the pleasures they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that’s the way I put it—weaned away.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous—and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight—and that, also, can shatter the world.