I don't really have a social life.

You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way! And that's how you get Capone.

In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other.

My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.

There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

People may or may not say what they mean ... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

No one enjoys being equal.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

When the gods would make us mad, they answer our prayers.

People only speak to get something.

The correct unit of study is not the play; it is the scene.

In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed unwittingly, the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?

Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.

The most charming of theories holds that someone other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays -- that he was of too low a state, and of insufficient education. But where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways.

The conscious mind is going to suggest the obvious, the cliché, because these things have offered the security of having succeeded in the past.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

Roll back the clock, and every possession of every great country started with a crime.

The greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.