Eugene O'Neill Views - World of Biography

O’Neill was always "feeling alone, and above, and apart". He considered himself "a stranger who never feels at home" and assumed that he "is not really wanted".

About his stay at the Gaylord Sanatorium, he said "My mind got the chance to Eugene O'Neill establish itself, to digest and evaluate the impressions of many past years in which one experience had crowded on another with never a second’s reflection. At Gaylord, I really thought about my life for the first time, about past and future. Undoubtedly the inactivity forced upon me by the life at the Sanatorium forced me to mental activity, especially as I had always been high-strung and nervous temperamentally."

"I kept writing because I had such a love of it. I was highly introspective, intensely nervous and self-conscious. I was very tense, I drank to overcome my shyness ---- when I was writing, I was alive."

Frank Best – "O’Neill was never a bum nor a borrower. He frequented the haunts of bums and seamen seeking true facts."

Muriel McComber – "He was delightful, lots of fun, and we had good times together, --- Eugene never discussed his family with me".

Clayton Hamilton, "He had large and dreamy eyes, Eugene O'Neill a slender, somewhat frail and yet athletic body, a habit of silence, and an evident disease of shyness."

Judge Frederick P Latimer, "There was something in Eugene, at that time, an innate nobility which inspires and drives a man, against whatever hindrance, to be himself, however heaven or hell conspires to rob him of that birthright."

Judge Fredrick P Latimer, "The four things about him that impressed me, at once, were his modesty, his native gentlemanliness, his wonderful eyes, and his literary style."

Impressions of his co-students at Harvard "foul-mouthed", "an inaptitude at dialogue, except when the speakers were raving drunk or profane".

"He was good-looking, very nervous and extremely impatient with Forty-seven----. He was friendly, though rather uneasy and inarticulate at times. You got the impression that he trembled a little and seemed trying to keep from stuttering. But when he delivered himself of a remark, it was impressive."

"A sarcastic bastard"

"Like an oyster in a lunchroom stew."

"(These) theoretical vaporings were to him simply so much asafoetida. While we sat open-mouthed and earnest, he would writhe and squirm in his chair, scowling and muttering in a mezza voice fearful imprecations and protests. Of him, too, we were frightened. He kept so much to himself. He did not invite approach for some weeks, we let him alone."

"There was something apparently irresistible in his strange combination of cruelty around his mouth, intelligence in his eyes, and sympathy in his Eugene O'Neill voice and eyes. He was not good-looking. --- He was hard – boiled and whimsical. He was brutal and tender, so I was told. --- About some things Gene was sphinx like."

George Jean Nathan, "I found O’Neill to be an extremely shy fellow, but one who nevertheless appeared to have a vast confidence in himself."

George Jean Nathan, "O’Neill is a deep running personality – the most ambitious mind I have encountered among American dramatists – an uncommon talent."

Olin Downes, "almost feminine sensibilities and has physical tremors and fears" and "this O’Neill is a man’s man, an adventurer born, reasonably close-cropped, spare, fit-looking and very brown, loathing soiled shirts and regretting passage of the Eighteenth Amendment."