There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

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

Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse.

Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I am not interested in the ephemeral -- such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.

Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.

It is in this sense that responsibility is liberty; the more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.

The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.

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.

Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

Camila was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.