“I am, as should be apparent, poking fun at those benighted souls who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare–the most prominent candidates being Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford–wrote Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. In a saner world, nobody would need to poke fun at them, for nobody would give them the time of day, there being no credible evidence whatsoever to support their claims…”

“PBS should air fine-arts programs that encompass the full range of the performing arts. That means not just The Nutcracker but ballet and modern-dance masterpieces of all kinds. It means not just ultrafamiliar operas but solo recitals and chamber music. It means not just Broadway musicals but performances of classic and contemporary plays. And these performances should take place not just in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco but in cities throughout America…”

“‘A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day,’ Orson Welles once told Peter Bogdanovich. ‘We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.’ Remember those words the next time you see someone basking in the sunshine of a standing ovation. What looks to you like a polite formality might just be the only thing capable of giving him the courage to pick up his pen tomorrow morning and face the music all over again…”

“Lincoln Center Festival is for all intents and purposes in the business of bringing foreign artists to New York–and American regional theater, unlike British theater, is devoid of the made-in-Europe snob appeal that goes over so well in New York. But what if Washington’s Kennedy Center, or some ambitious presenter in Denver or Palm Beach or San Francisco, undertook the task of putting on an all-American Shakespeare festival? Or, better still, a festival of great American plays performed by our top regional companies?…”

“Before there were regional theaters, there was Charles Laughton. Today most people remember him for having played Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame and the snarling Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty, but between 1949 and 1952 he spent much of his time not in Hollywood but on the road with Charles Boyer, Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorehead. Billing themselves as the First Drama Quartette, these four middle-aged stars barnstormed from coast to coast, performing George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell in sports arenas, banquet halls and civic auditoriums that had never before offered anything more daunting than fluffy farces like Arsenic and Old Lace…”

“Who has the best job in the world? When I was a boy, I had no doubt that it was Charles Kuralt, a balding, paunchy correspondent for CBS News who spent his days roaming around America in a battered white motor home, stopping along the way to file feature stories about plain-spoken, good-hearted men and women who carved merry-go-round horses by hand, made bricks out of mud, and led untroubled lives in towns even smaller than the one in which I grew up…”

“New playwrights deserve a chance, and it looks like most of our drama companies are giving it to at least some of them. But it also appears that far too many of those same companies may be steering clear of the classical revivals that are no less central to the continuing health of a theatrical culture…”

“When Donald E. Westlake died unexpectedly last New Year’s Eve, thousands of people who’d never met him, myself included, felt as if they’d lost a friend. We knew him only through his novels, of which there are more than a hundred, none of them, so far as I know, obviously autobiographical. He almost always wrote about crime, and more often than not he wrote about it with the express intention of making his readers laugh. Small wonder that we loved him so…”