Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 12

Filmmaking materials are in the hands of more people now than ever before. I would like to think that the more people have these tools, the more people will learn how to use them, it's another argument I would argue for, personally, for art's education. Because there are kids who aren't that literate in screen language and they've got to know how people select shots, how people edit audio, how people combine things to make what they see on the screen. It would be like the 15th century or the 16th century in Germany, and somebody amends a printing press and you don't know how to read and write.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

One night some short weeks ago, for the first time in her not always happy life, Marilyn Monroe's soul sat down alone to a quiet supper from which it did not rise.

Good listeners, like precious gems, are to be treasured.

This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it.

The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.

There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

He only half dies who leaves an image of himself in his sons.

The trees that are slow to grow bear the best fruit.

Nobody in love has a sense of humor.

Follow your intuition, listening to your dreams, your inner voice to guide you.

The best thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in look as much like home as we can.

I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.

The most valuable blacks are those in prison, those who have the warrior spirit, who had a sense of being African. They got for their women and children what they needed when all other avenues were closed to them.

I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself.

Feeling intimidated is a good sign. Writing from a place of safety produces stuff that is at best dull and at worst dishonest.

Artists know that diligence counts as much, if not more, as inspiration; in art, as in politics, patience counts as much as revolution.

We've been told there's a certain way to live ... that this is living ... and we ... we never really questioned it. We just sort of went along. But what if it's not the best way? What if there's another way that's better? What if there's something more?!

Why should we break up Our snug and pleasant party? Time was made for slaves, But never for us so hearty.

I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc.

Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew.

I think of a plot, I think of an idea, and then I wonder, How can I get that onto the stage? . . . Whatever devices you use should always be there to serve the theme. If the theme has been overtaken by the device, then something's wrong.

A wonderful discovery, psychoanalysis. Makes quite simple people feel they're complex.

My first plays were amazingly bad, but I had a teacher who thought I had promise, and he kept working with me. I finally went to a summer workshop before my senior year with people like Sam Shepard and Maria Irene Fornes who encouraged me to write from my subconscious, and suddenly all this material about culture clash came out.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

When you get a bunch of Latinxs together, we get to handle our stories. A cultural shorthand happens.

I’m a child of the universe, I have lived in almost all continents.

The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.

I think success has no rules, but you can learn a great deal from failure.

Childhood is a promise that is never kept.

This free will business is a bit terrifying anyway. It's almost pleasanter to obey, and make the most of it.

He's very concealed, Polanski. We became very close friends, but I don't think I ever saw him drop his guard. I didn't see him upset or anything like that, we just did the work.

Monogamy is like a 40-watt bulb. It works, but it's not enough.

You know, one had as good be out of the world, as out of the fashion.

People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer.

The way plays happen, at least with me, it's spontaneous combustion of things you've had in your head.

Write backwards. Start from the feeling you want the audience to have at the end and then ask "How might that happen?" continually, until you have a beginning.

Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

I mean he's a very famous director... they're not going to put their... and he's very tough, he doesn't like interference at all, so he kept them at bay.

Noble bold is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great.

Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them.

Search fearlessly for every sin, for out of sin comes joy.

The young person isn't certain that love can be real; the middle-aged man is only discovering that it is; and the older person seems so sure of it. I was interested in the way that many of us go through the whole of our lives staying with someone just out of complacency, because leaving isn't easy.

If it's December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?

Patience is the best remedy for every trouble.

Geography does not define you - love does.

To be honest, it's more fun being the underdog.

Nobody's safe around a writer.

I think it's scary to be alive, but also exhilarating and joyful.

Choosing a director is like choosing a therapist - you want somebody who is going to be a step or two ahead of you, who can interpret and articulate your intentions better than you can, with the benefit of objectivity. I look for a collaborator who is going to help bring to life, on stage, in three dimensions, what is on the page. I wouldn't want a director who imposes conceits or distrusts the text or who has prejudged the characters.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.

I eat merely to put food out of my mind.

The only people who grow old were born old to begin with.

That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously.

Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves.

I'd the upbringing a nun would envy. Until I was fifteen I was more familiar with Africa than my own body.

In terms of the secrets that imbue and underlie 'Fall on Your Knees', they were as much of a mystery to me as I was creating the story as they are to the readers.

Twenty years ago, when you bumped into someone and asked how they were, they would say, 'Mustn't grumble' or 'Getting by': now they feel obliged to say 'Just great!'. In both cases, the reply is just a social nicety, but the framework has changed, it's as if it's become a social duty to express happiness.

I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters.