‘Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory.’
'When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I’m only really alive when I’m writing.’
'At the age of fourteen I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable.’
'I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do–then go ahead and do it with ease. Don’t maul, don’t suffer, don’t groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself.’
It is a lonely idea, a lonely condition, so terrifying to think of that we usually don’t. And so we talk to each other, write and wire each other, call each other short and long distance across land and sea, clasp hands with each other at meeting and at parting, fight each other and even destroy each other because of this always somewhat thwarted effort to break through walls to each other. As a character in a play once said, “We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins.” Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.
— “Person—to—Person” an introduction to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; published in The New York Times March 20, 1955
BRICK: Well, sir, every so often you say to me, Brick, I want to have a talk with you, but when we talk, it never materializes. Nothing is said. You sit in a chair and gas about this and that and I look like I listen, but I don’t listen, not much. Communication is—awful hard between people an'—somehow between you and me, it just don't—happen.
— Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
SHANNON [savagely]: How about wall-tappings between us by way of communication? You know, like convicts in separate cells communicate with each other by tapping on the walls of the cells? One tap: I’m here. Two taps: are you there? Three taps: yes, I am. Four taps: that’s good, we’re together. Christ! …
— The Night of the Iguana
CHANCE: We’ve come back to the sea. PRINCESS: What sea? CHANCE: The Gulf. PRINCESS: The Gulf? CHANCE: The Gulf of misunderstanding between me and you… .
— Sweet Bird of Youth
VAL (sitting on counter): Well, in answer to your last question, I would say this: Nobody ever gets to know no body! We’re each of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life! You understand me, Lady?—I’m tellin’ you it’s the truth, we got to face it, we’re under a lifelong sentence to solitary confinement inside our own lonely skins for as long as we live on this earth!
— Orpheus Descending
TOM: No. You say there’s so much in your heart that you can’t describe to me. That’s true of me, too. There’s so much in my heart that I can’t describe to you!
— The Glass Menagerie
ALMA: I’ve gone out with three seriously—and with each one there was a desert between us. JOHN: What do you mean by a desert? ALMA: Oh, wide, wide, stretches of uninhabitable ground. I’d try to talk, he’d try to talk. Oh, we’d talk quite a lot—but then it would be—exhausted—the talk, the effort.
