Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 11

Teenagers all think their life is a movie. If you break up with someone or you have a fight, you walk around with movie scores playing in your head. You sort of see yourself suffering as you're suffering. There's a lot of melodrama attached to the real events of your life.

I went straight in. Fade in, one... whatever. He's playing the piano in the radio station.

I don't believe in updating. If a play works, it draws something from being true to its time.

People who are intolerant, categorize and over-react... should all be dragged against a wall and shot.

Men and women of high professional standing were reduced to the status of vagrants, unable to find employment and forced to eat the bitter bread of public or private charity.

NASA scientists announced the discovery of 50 new planets, among them what they're calling Super Earth. It's indistinguishable from regular earth until it removes its glasses.

For Myrth prolongeth lyfe, and causeth health.

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise.

Art is a way of freezing time, or extending time. ... It's another way to bridge the gaps between us.

Don't drink alone, Scarlett. People always find out and it ruins your reputation.

All citizens including women are equally admissible to all public dignities, offices, and employments, according to their capacity, and with no other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.

You write a play mostly out of yourself. There's a need to get a certain thing down.

A lot of writing is thinking.

I always say writing a play is like toothache: I find it incredibly painful, and it's only once the play's out that the pain is gone.

We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.

Spending the day with you has been marginally better than watching mother die of cancer.

The laws of this world are for children.

It is not time for mirth and laughter, the cold, gray dawn of the morning after.

Stolen sweets are best.

September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.

And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present.

Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money.

The name of God should no longer come from the mouth of man. This word that has so long been degraded by usage no longer means anything.... To use the word God is more than sloth, it is a refusal to think, a king of short cut, a hideous shorthand.

He was a god, such as men might be, if men were gods.

I can only speak for myself, but when I was growing up in Memphis - and having the Martin Luther King holiday and the moment of pause on April 4th - he was just a statue to me. I wanted to make him a little bit more real to me as a human being.

At the end of the day, nothing is achievable if you don't have the right collaborators.

They spend their time looking forward to the past.

If our main goal is to connect emotionally, we should want to have as many tools as we possibly can to achieve that goal. The more abilities that we have, the more choices we can make musically.

The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.

The success-haters. That's what I call them -- the people who have never got what they want and turned sour on everybody who has. The world's full of them. As soon as you've made good they begin to watch for you to fail.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a way into something important happening in modern-day culture.

I was taught to lie at a young age. . . . I think that [A PARK IN OUR HOUSE] describes what people make out of their reality in a totalitarian system like Castro's. They take flight and move into the imagination in order to transcend their immediate reality. I had to write this play. It helped me understand my own loss of innocence.

All of us are mad. If it weren't for the fact every one of us is slightly abnormal, there wouldn't be any point in giving each person a separate name.

The financial crisis happened because no-one could actually say out loud how bad things were.

Do you see what I mean?! About the theater?! I'm back here for three hours and I'm acting like a lunatic. I'll be in analysis till I'm a hundred

To love the right person is a comedy. To love the wrong person is a tragedy.

We die only once, and for such a long time.

Yes, I've heard of the 'Mad Men' comparisons, but I like to think 'The Hour' has its own distinctive voice. Although it is set in 1956, I have tried to give it a contemporary edge, and its themes of love, passion, romance, fury, professional jealousy, and personal failure are universal, I think.

I'm interested in people who are dwelling outside the mainstream. And very often, those people happen to be woman of color.

What girl could fail to make a conquest who collapsed at a man's feet in the moonlight?

I have no personal experience in the military. All I know about it is what I've seen in movies and read in books and watched on television. My knowledge is probably no more or no less than the average person's. 'A Brief Encounter with the Enemy' was created by taking bits and pieces from here and there, and then putting my own spin on them.

Do you have to open graves to find girls to fall in love with?

Well we took it apart scene by scene. We examined every sentence, every full stop, every comma. He has a most wonderful eye for detail, Roman, and you know, he's a very good artist.

I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.

And what would be great numbers in a Broadway show are now on stage of the New York City Ballet.

I am a writer. I suppose I think that the highest gift that man has is art, and I am audacious enough to think of myself as an artist - that there is both joy and beauty and illumination and communion between people to be achieved through the dissection of personality.

Before this address to my countrymen is closed, I beg leave to observe, that as a new century has dawned upon us, the mind is naturally led ot contemplate the great events that have run parallel with and have just closed the last.

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.

Good writing is often about trying to investigate something you feel is missing and trying to put it back.

There are thousands of causes for stress, and one antidote to stress is self-expression. That's what happens to me every day. My thoughts get off my chest, down my sleeves and onto my pad.

When do I say No? I say No when I feel that the intention of the play, or the spirit, or tone - or text! - is being knowingly changed. Fortunately, this has happened only once. Next time I would say No earlier, and definitively. Otherwise, ultimately, the only No you have is No, you can't open the play. And that No is very very hard to say.

Integrity of life is fame's best friend, which nobly, beyond death, shall crown in the end.

While drawing, I discover what I really want to say.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

People often tell me, "You write such great women." I don't think about it, I just write characters as rigorously and as truthfully as I can and hope, no matter their gender, that their humanity comes through.

Well, there are some who claim I'm more of one nation than another, but that's not true, Eddie. I'm of all nations, I play no favorites.

In order to be great, you just have to care. You have to care about your world, community, and equality.