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And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want. 'Cause what could be more satisfying than to be able to go, at the age of eighty-four, into twenty or thirty different cities, and pick up a phone, and be remembered and loved and helped by so many different people?
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I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.
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I've always made a point of not wasting my life, and every time I come back here I know that all I've done is to waste my life.
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I figure I've done what I could do, more or less, and now I'm going back to being a chemical; all we are is a lot of talking nitrogen, you know...
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The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.
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I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything.
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A playwright lives in an occupied country… And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
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Work a lifetime to pay off a house - You finally own it and there's nobody to live in it.
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He have his goodness now, God forbid I take it from him!
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Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house - in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.
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I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match.
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By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.
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An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.
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The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down…. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.
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Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
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I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.
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A person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between. This is a sharp time, now, a precise time - we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.
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Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
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A playwright … is … the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great.
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You cut your life down for spite!
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The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.
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Isn't that - isn't that remarkable? Biff - he likes me!
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I'm a fatalist. … I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding.
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That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?