“Pirates could happen to anyone.”

“To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.”

“We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.”

“Now for a handful of guilders I happen to have a private and uncut performance of the rape of the Sabine Women - or rather woman, or rather Alfred -Get your skirt on Alfred!”

“Actors! The mechanics of cheap melodrama! That isn't death! You scream and choke and sink to your knees but it doesn't bring death home to anyone- it doesn't catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls that says- 'One day you are going to die.”

“Why do I have a sense of impending disaster?(He reflects) Sonders is after my niece and has discovered the secret address where I am sending her to the safe keeping of my sister-in-law Miss Blumenblatt, who has never laid eyes on him, or, for that matter, on Marie either since she was a baby—while I have to leave my business in the charge of my assistant and an apprentice, and follow my new servant, whom I haven't had time to introduce to anyone, to town to join the parade and take my fiancée to dinner in a uniform I can't sit down in.One false move and we could have a farce on our hands.”

“It could have been--it didn't have to be obscene.... It could have been--a bird out of season, dropping bright-feathered on my shoulder.... It could have been a tongueless dwarf standing by the road to point the way.... I was prepared. But it's this, is it? No enigma, no dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this--a comic pornographer and a rabble of prostitutes....”