Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. We all have a dark side, a tendency to manipulate, and aggressive desires. The most dangerous types are those who repress their desires or deny the existence of them, often acting them out in the most underhanded ways.

Conquered, we conquer.

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

Betrayal is the only truth that sticks.

I wake up every day and I think, 'I'm breathing! It's a good day.'

Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism.

A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time. We congratulate a rival on a triumph when actually we are choking on spite. We are cordial and attentive to crashing bores.

In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications.

Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you.

We have no reliable guarantee that the afterlife will be any less exasperating than this one, have we?

Replace judgment with curiosity.

Everybody wants to be remembered for the best of who they are.

Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.

The older I get, the more I have to think long and hard about what I need to say and why.

Technology can become a crutch. Sometimes it's there just to hide behind when you're shy of what you're trying to say.

Things are beautiful if you love them.

I am so homesick every day of the week.

When you're the artsy, weirdo, introverted outsider growing up, you don't fit into your community.

To insure peace of mind ignore the rules and regulations.

No one but a fool is always right.

I grew up going to the movies, not watching them on television, so I'm still a bit resistant to TV as a medium.

There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.

Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy.

I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on.

I've got a fondness for rabbits.

The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama.

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.

If no one ever took risks, Michaelangelo would have painted the Sistine floor.

Sisterhood is important because we are all we have to stand on. We have to stand near and by each other, pray for one another, and share the joys and the difficulties that women face in the world today. If we don't talk about it among ourselves, then we are made silent by the patriarchy, and that serves us no purpose.

I define the American dream as the ability to imagine a way that you want your life to turn out, and have a reasonable hope that you can achieve that.

All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.

Imagination is as effortless as perception, unless we think it might be ‘wrong’, which is what our education encourages us to believe.

I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true!

Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith.

Conscience is the most dangerous thing you possess. If you wake it up, it may destroy you. To live a life of total moral rigor is not necessarily the way to go. It's the path for very few people. Most people need to come up with some kind of middle ground that satisfies their practical, moral, and philosophical esthetic needs.

Like any young person who gets into a political campaign, I joined out of a highfalutin' desire to change the world. But you start to see the sort of tactics people use. You start to see politics not only in the macro but in the micro of the campaign itself. Some people get turned off by this side of it. Other people are drawn to it.

I have no interest in trying to manipulate people's emotions or opinions.

While writing my memoir, 'When Skateboards Will Be Free,' I would sometimes have to pore over hours of microfilm at the New York Public Library in order to try to get one obscure detail right. For instance, was the Socialist Workers Party originally called the American Workers Party or the Workers Party of the United States?

AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.

A theatre, a literature, an artistic expression that does not speak for its own time has no relevance.

If the internet has taught us anything, it's that you want less news and more cats.

Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.

It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy.

I've always been a fighter - it's always been a part of my personality.

Serendipity always rewards the prepared.

There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success.

Because of Mozart, it's all over after the age of seven.

Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.

I think in a lot of romantic comedies it ends with a kiss, and I feel like in modern day relationships, and maybe just my own experience, it starts with a kiss and then all sort of falls apart and then comes together. You're texting. You're wondering what's going on. There's no definitions, there's no labels.

There is a method in man's wickedness; it grows up by degrees.

It's really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don't get in trouble.

'An Octoroon' was written over about three years but premiered in 2014. I'm writing about America's relationship to its own history. Race or not, it's a story about suppression and oppression and many populations being devalued systematically.

Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.

Do you care about freedom? Dreams may have inspired it, and wishes prompted it, but only war and weapons have made it yours.

If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn't write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy.

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat.

'Posh' is not really political. I didn't want to aim a brickbat at the system. Or to bash Old Etonians. It was always the class and privilege aspect of that world that I was most drawn to. There is something endlessly fascinating about imagining something you could never be involved in.

I'm a constant idiot in conversation - I always seem to sound either smug or stupid. Writing plays was a way of winning the conversation by controlling the conversation.