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" Being among my people is a delight. We Jews live among ourselves. I love it. "

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" I love the British. "

" The essence of jiu-jitsu is philosophy. "

" I hate vacations. There's nothing to do. "

" I know very well what it is to be out of work and to be cheated by employers and I know what it is to be an employer. "

" They say you can't study Kabbalah until you are at least 40 years old. You know why? You have to have experienced at least one generation making the same mistakes as the previous one. "

" I've always been more comfortable sinking while clutching a good theory than swimming with an ugly fact. "

" People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.' "

" Here's what happens in a play. You get involved in a situation where something is unbalanced. If nothing's unbalanced, there's no reason to have a play. If Hamlet comes home from school, and his dad's not dead and asks him if he's had a good time, it's boring. But if something's unbalanced, it must be returned to order. "

" People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want. "

" What I value most in my friends is loyalty. "

" Our job, as writers is to do our jobs. "

" A play is basically a long, formalistic polemic. You can write it without the poetry, and if you do, you may have a pretty good play. We know this because we see plays in translation. Not many people speak Norwegian or Danish or whatever guys like Ibsen spoke, or Russian - yet we understand Chekhov and the others. "

" In Chicago, we love our crooks! "

" The main question in drama, the way I was taught, is always, 'What does the protagonist want?' That's what drama is. It comes down to that. It's not about theme, it's not about ideas, it's not about setting, but what the protagonist wants. "

" There's no such thing as talent; you just have to work hard enough. "

" There's nothing in the world more silent than the telephone the morning after everybody pans your play. It won't ring from room service; your mother won't be calling you. If the phone has not rung by 8 in the morning, you're dead. "

" Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it's still evolving in different ways. "

" I like Bach. I like Randy Newman. "

" When we leave the play saying how spectacular the sets or costumes were, or how interesting the ideas, it means we had a bad time. "

" Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom. "

" In practice we, in the world, must do business with each other. "

" You can't write about history without writing about politics at some point. History is about movements of people. 'What is criminality and what is government' is a theme that runs through every history. "

" I don't think there's any information to be gotten from television. "

" It's hard to write a good plot, it's very hard. "

" Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost. "

" The poker player learns that sometimes both science and common sense are wrong; that the bumblebee can fly; that, perhaps, one should never trust an expert; that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those with an academic bent. "

" American football seems to resemble soccer in that one scores by putting the ball through the opponent's goal; but football, truly is about land. The Settlers want to move the line of scrimmage Westward, the Native Americans want to move it East. "

" The basis of drama is... the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. "

" My definition of a 'friend' is, coming from Chicago, someone who says, 'Yeah, sure. You know what? Let's talk about what we can talk about. Let's help each other out. Your politics are none of my business.' "

" I'm greedy and ambitious like everybody else. "