Archives for February 25, 2014

From 2004:

I like getting along with people–though I wouldn’t pay any price for it. But the truth is that my inclination to companionability has never been put to anything like a severe test. I have good friends whose views I think silly, but none who seem to me downright evil (and I believe in the existence of evil). I sometimes wonder what I’d do if I were to learn that a friend of mine had committed a cold-blooded murder. I like to think that I wouldn’t have befriended such a person in the first place, and that’s probably true–but human nature is complicated enough that I can’t say so with certainty….

Read the whole thing here.

“Laughter cannot be faked, no matter how much good will an audience has toward an author. For an audience, whether it consists of one person or one thousand, shortly becomes a valid one in spite of itself the moment the mechanism of listening starts to operate. Every author, unless he chooses to be willfully self-deluded, carries a Geiger counter in his inner ear that tells him quickly enough whether he has struck the false politeness of hollow laughter or the real thing. There is no mistaking it.”
Moss Hart, Act One