"We need things to reach for. If we don't have things to reach for, our lives get filled with things that are meaningless, that are momentarily distracting but have no exalting possibilities."
"I love to have quarrels over plays. I think it shows that the work is alive. But I hate to get letters about it. If you asked me, 'What's the mark of a very vivid production?', I'd say it's the controversy outside the theatre, the argument out on the bricks, that is the mark of a good show."
"Most people (including a lot of intelligent people) like to say they know what they like when they really mean they like what they know."
"It is important for us to recognize on every level that access to our highest culture is a meaningful right of citizenship, and not something to fill in the recreational gaps between commercial exertions. A culturally deprived individual is a poor individual, not able to achieve his potential in life. Likewise, a nation starved in its cultural expressiveness is a poor nation in its spirit, however outwardly prosperous it may seem."
"The theatre owes its artistic life to its singular ability to project uniquely human values to a large and diverse contemporary community.... We do not seek to startle our audiences into perceptions, but to interpret the plays with our own 20th-century skills and insights to bring them forcefully into our consciousness as living documents. Our motto, almost from the beginning, has been 'What's Past is Prologue.'"
"In the long run, a 'National Endowment for Nice Art' could prove more dangerous than we know."
"It is the complicity of actor and witness that, it seems to me, lies at the heart of the theatrical expression."
"Every generation not only has its own Hamlet, it has its own Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Melville and Arthur Miller. A great work of art is great in part because it has the capacity to live, that is to say, it has the capacity to change, as the world and the culture change."
"But always there was this nagging doubt that literature, and especially theatre, might not be respectable. Certainly they were trivial, and if not sinful, an absolute waste of good time." (on the arts in America)
"The great flowerings of civilization (the Renaissance, classical Greece and the like) were brought about by choice — a consciousness of the possibilities of cultural excellence." (1981)
"A steady diet of happy endings is not to serve an audience but to exploit it."
"The meaning of a good play is as elusive as truth. It's never really found but the search for it is omnipotent and important."
"Without passion, theatre is just another low-paying job."