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A play
is a world, with its own inhabitants and its own laws and its values. Seek goodness
everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and
let be free and unashamed. Encourage
virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow
by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore
the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart. No man's
guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise
evil and un godliness but not men of un godliness or evil. In the
time of your life, live....so that in that wondrous time you shall not
add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite
delight and mystery of it all. I was an
old man by the time I took that walk to the Public Library in San Francisco,
because the years between birth and twenty are the years in which the
soul travels farthest and swiftest. Love of
the streets is the love out of which I see deeply I love God, how near
I come to the truth. A writer
wants what he has to say to be heard again and again. He wants it to
be heard after he is dead. I can't
hate for long. It isn't worth it. My writing
is careless, but all through it is something that is good, that is mine
alone, that no other writer could ever achieve. What is
a street? It is where the living weep, where the dead go off in silence
to their peace. The order
I found was the order of disorder. I do not
know what makes a writer, but it probably is happiness. But the
world was my home and I was glad to be in it. I loved
the theaters, and even though I was hungry, I never spent money for
food. The streets
made me, and the streets stink, but I love them, for I was born in them
out of flesh and I was born in them out of spirit. Merely
to survive is to keep the hope greatness, accuracy, and the grace alive. At his
best, things do not happen to the artist; he happens to them. Neither
love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement
in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom
and this necessity to be kind. It is impossible
not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and
fear. I was a
little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to
be: the victim of the world. I see death
as a private event, the destruction of the universe in the brain and
in the senses of man, and I cannot see any man's death as a contributing
factor in the success or failure of a military campaign.
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