Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 13

I just loved being divorced from my own wretchedness.

Then marriage may be said to be past in all quietnesse, when the wife is blind, and the husband deafe.

I'm always struck when I go somewhere I've never been before, especially if it's in my home town, by just how different the atmosphere can be, and how disorienting it can be - especially if there's any kind of trouble.

Be good. Do good. The devil wields no power over a good man.

Telling takes away the need to write. It relieves the pressure. And once that tension dissipates, so does the need to relieve it. First write it, then we’ll talk about it.

I'm very comfortable in the air. And if you're really in love with flight, you're in love to a certain extent with being outside of the body, not grounded. The problem is, if you're not in your body, you can't actually feel anything particularly authentically.

If nature had intended our skeletons to be visible it would have put them on the outside of our bodies.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

Heed not Mephistopheles, my children, lest you suffer eternal damnation. When he whispers in your ear, turn away your head and hearken instead to the angel on your shoulder.

We're one of the last handmade art forms. There's no fast way to make plays. It takes just as long and is just as hard as it was a thousand years ago.

Not all people are ready to accept psychiatry as a normal branch of medicine. The general impression, as I believe, is that a man who needs a psychiatrist must be crazy.

Democratic principles are the result of equality of condition.

We had a certain kind of really big prestige among, I suppose not just intellectual folk, but a sort of nice middle class intelligent folk of a very urban nature.

I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.

We're predators; we don't eat meat because it's handy, we eat meat because we have a taste for blood.

It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

There's no rage like old lady rage, just as there's no tenderness like old lady tenderness.

Confidence comes in going on personal journeys in a public arena and feeling as though you have a right to do that. You have to give yourself permission to discover what you need to discover and not worry about how pretty the journey is. If you're aware of the pretty, you're not going to dig into the mess.

It's true, I don't like the real world.

I can go anywhere. In fact, for 'Three Billboards,' I was just getting on trains around America. I wrote everywhere from New York to New Mexico. I always write with pencil and paper.

I love writing for the screen.

I hate the idea of theatre just being an evening pastime. It should be emotionally and intellectually demanding. I love football. The level of analysis that you listen to on the terraces is astonishing. If people did that in the theatre... but they don't. They expect to sit back and not participate.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.

Spending time with math people is a lot of fun. As a result of the play, I've had semi-drunken dinners with mathematicians all over the country. I recommend the experience.

I love the students - they are remarkable, inspiring people. I would miss teaching if I stopped doing it. The kind of work I do is pretty diverse: I can cast a play while doing a polish of a screenplay, while thinking about a new play and revising another. In other words, the kind of work that I do during my work day is not just writing, yet it is all part of the job of being a playwright.

It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it.

Truth in the end shall prevail.

I see so many fools in this world that sometimes I could just go home and cry about what people do to themselves Hey, wake up, wake up, look here! Think a minute, think a minute. This is your life! You got, what, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years here, and you gonna be gone.'

I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.

Art is meant to strike us with Reality, not allow us to hide from it.

There's sure no passion in the human soul, But finds its food in music.

I think art is a healing force, and if we give in to the joy that can be found in art, then we are able to sustain ourselves in spite of ourselves.

What shall we call this undetermin'd state, This narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless oceans, That whence we came, and that to which we tend?

Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

It's a lucky life to be a playwright.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

I guess I'm attracted and repelled by isolation. It scares me. And it's why I tend to write about older characters, too, because for them the stakes are somewhat higher.

It is not only for what we do that we are held responsible, but also for what we do not do.

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.

You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.

The political world is a dark place. If you want to portray it accurately, authentically, you've got to turn out the lights from time to time.

It's what you do when you have Allison Janney.My jaw-dropped at her performance. You think that part is sort of a regular part until she steps into the shoes of the officer. She just filled it with such dimension and by giving her the whole shebang, the whole police thread, I think it was the right choice.

No one can ever help loving anyone.

Dance has a transformative effect on bodily trauma.

You reach a time... when fact and fiction blend seamlessly. If you do it too soon, it's journalism. If you do it too late, you forget, and it's fantasy. There's an optimum time.

I work in the most non-Communist job. I work for 'Martha Stewart Living.'

The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul.

In the business of war, the role of women is really to maintain normalcy and ensure that there is cultural continuity.

Rain knows the earth and loves it well, for rain is the passion of the earth.

If two percent of all the films made in Hollywood are really artistically worthy - and I think it's a lot more than two percent - that's a pretty big percentage of things that will outlive their own generation.

Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

What you get free costs too much.

Everybody believes that capital punishment is wrong, but when they look at certain cases, they're quick to say, 'Put them to death,' or scream 'capital punishment.'

My father had a real short fuse. He had a tough life - had to support his mother and brother at a very young age when his dad's farm collapsed. You could see his suffering, his terrible suffering, living a life that was disappointing and looking for another one. My father was full of terrifying anger.

Duncan Sheik and I are trucking along on 'American Psycho,' which is sort of the anti-Superman, you know? But it's a lot of fun, too, in a much, much darker way, obviously.

[I was] particularly eager to give voice to the women of my mother's place and generation, who grew up in turn-of-the-century, privileged New England households, who really never had a chance to flower and assess themselves and find out who they were. More than anything, I wanted to give voice to the sort of anger that women of that generation could never express for themselves.

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.