It's fine when you careen off disasters and terrifyingly bad reviews and rejection and all that stuff when you're young; your resilience is just terrific.

The truth of the matter is that I have lasted a long time, and with it comes both good and bad things. One of the good things is that no one can ever take my career away from me. No one can ever say, 'You can't be in the theater any more.'

Nobody has yet proven that taking a chance and doing something unique that an audience isn't used to is a bad idea. What the theater lacks is that kind of courage.

[Leaves of Grass is] monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.

[About John Updike's Rabbit Run] The author fails to convince us that his puppets are interesting in themselves, or that their plight has implications that transcend their narrow world.

On a book by Henry James: "Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up.