“We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

“Peace. It is a providence, and no great change; we are only what we always were, but naked now.”

“I personally think that what the big (writers) have in common is a fierce moral sensibility, which is unquenchable and they are all burning with the same anger at the way the world is.The little ones have made a peace with it, and the bigger ones can't make any peace.”

“The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.”

“Property breeds lawyers, I said, forbearing to add a belief that unfortunately property now seemed the only thing palpable enough to demand the respect of governments, and perhaps was the generating clout against encroachments on the spiritual protections for speech, assembly, and so on. It might turn out that without the right to possess we are not sure we really have the right to speak and to be.”

“The two most common elements in the world are hydrogen and stupidity.”

“I am amazed all over again by how magnified this project's importance has become, far beyond its being a play or an artwork. It is now a test of some kind; but of what, precisely? The incommunicability of the Chinese? If I can't claim to know my actors, I know them as well or as little as I would an American cast. I can no longer call up the notion of Chinese mysteriousness.”