I look upon life as a gift from God. I did nothing to earn it. Now that the time is coming to give it back, I have no right to complain.

What is it in the actor, the stage, that casts so powerful a spell on the young imagination?

No one can estimate the power of authority among poor and uneducated people in a world whose problems confuse even the wisest.

Authority, as he knows it, is always dangerous, selfish, inexplicable. It looks after its own mysterious affairs in a dark privacy. It never explains.

A foul-mouthed oaf, a drunken laborer lying in a drain, a beaten wife with blackened eyes and torn clothes, cannot be made romantic to a child who sees how other children suffer from bad-tempered parents, from drunken fathers to termagant mothers.

For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.

Where can one find a profounder desolation than in the poor child who has lost its mother?

Drink, in those days, was an evil inconceivable in ours. The fearful uncertainty of life, unemployment, the appalling squalor of slums, drove millions of the weaker nerve to drink.

Funeral expenses are the curse of the poor everywhere on earth, they are wasteful and unnecessary, they are the price of foolish ostentation and a display that is less an evidence of grief than a vulgar travesty of those pompous obsequies where no grief is.

Of all things I find most unbearable is the injustice of one generation to another.