American Quotes

I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.

Being slightly paranoid is like being slightly pregnant - it tends to get worse.

Satire is traditionally the weapon of the powerless against the powerful.

As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can't drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against 'em anyway, you don't belong in office.

Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.'

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.

There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone's. The meaning of 'God' may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.

The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.

One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity.

But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.

Every great inspiration is but an experiment.

The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring.

I stopped and gazed on the little dull man who was being paid to be a teacher of teachers. I turned and walked to the door, slammed it closed with a bang, and broken glass crashed to the floor. There was uproar behind me in the class, which did not interest me at all.