“I was supposed to write a romantic comedy, but my characters broke up.”

The Paris Review interview (1984)
Context: The theater chose me. As I said, I started with poetry, and I also wrote criticism and dialogue. But I realized that I was most successful at dialogue. Perhaps I abandoned criticism because I am full of contradictions, and when you write an essay you are not supposed to contradict yourself. But in the theater, by inventing various characters, you can. My characters are contradictory not only in their language, but in their behavior as well.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424ta_talk_friend
On 30 Rock

As quoted in "Ba Jin: A Century of Literary Greatness" at the China Internet Information Center (November 2003) http://www.china.org.cn/english/2003/Nov/80700.htm

Source: This is Where I Leave You

Telegram to his brother, upon the news that Addison was fatally ill.
Quoted by Stuart B. McIver, Dreamers, Schemers and Scalawags, Pineapple Press, Sarasota, Florida, 1994. ISBN 1-56164-034-4.
On Death and Dying

Primetime interview (Jan 2004)

Interview with Oriana Fallaci (November 1972), as quoted in &quot;Oriana Fallaci and the Art of the Interview&quot; in Vanity Fair (December 2006) http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2006/12/hitchens200612; Kissinger, as quoted in &quot;Special Section: Chagrined Cowboy&quot; in TIME magazine (8 October 1979) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,916877,00.html called this &quot;without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press&quot; and claimed that he had probably been misquoted or quoted out of context, but Fallaci later produced the tapes of the interview. <br class="br">1970s <br class="br">Context: I&#x27;ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely.<br>Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else. Maybe even without a pistol, since he doesn&#x27;t shoot. He acts, that&#x27;s all, by being in the right place at the right time. In short, a Western. … This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style or, if you like, my technique.

As quoted in "V.S. Naipaul in Search of Himself: A Conversation" with Mel Gussow, The New York Times, (24 April 1994)

Appreciation, Postscript (1889)