Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 15

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Young people have got to start their own theaters, really. All good theater is a kind of mom-and-pop operation. Start your own theater.

I had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage.

I'm interested in the way that the language of labor has been suppressed in our culture, the way it has disappeared from our vocabulary and is never heard on stage. . . . I'm better at writing than I am at organizing [political action]. SLAUGHTER CITY is my small contribution. If it gives people a voice it is worth something. So often we forget what we are no longer hearing.

Maybe the biggest misconception humanity has about itself is that by gaining more power over the world, over the environment, we will be able to make ourselves happier and more satisfied with life. Looking again from a perspective of thousands of years, we have gained enormous power over the world and it doesn't seem to make people significantly more satisfied than in the stone age.

Eagles commonly fly alone. They are crows, daws, and starlings that flock together.

What if we're all like that? Like ghosts ... in someone's mind ... gradually fading ... fading ... until finally ... one day ... we just disappear ... drift into nothingness. Wouldn't that be sad?

Monuments are for the living, not the dead.

I had no agenda in writing this play except expressing myself. . . . It later occurred to me that I was not only announcing things to my family; I was announcing it to the world. Of course, if the play had been a flop, only my family would have known.

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness.

A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general.

I'm not interested in entertainment.

At first it's pretty cool: the limitless fruit of knowledge hanging low in your path. Then you realize it's the only thing to eat around here.

If Darwin's theories are true, then we have within us the physical memory of when we were fish or apes.

Of bird and prophet and his light shall lead On through the darkness to eventual light, To undiscovered wealth, to newer need . . .

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being skin deep. That's deep enough. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?

Multiculturalism isn't about culture, it's about power.

I'd like to walk into a room sometime and be introduced as the author of something other than that play. There's always one thing in a career that has more impact than anything else. In my case, 'The Subject Was Roses' was that thing.

Passive pleasure is no pleasure at all.

I've lived with women, loved women, lost women. They've loved me, lost me, whatever.

To exaggerate is to weaken.

I didn't have a teacher like Sister Mary Ignatius.

I want to give up being a bullet I've been a bullet too long The question is Can you give up being a killer?

When a man can observe himself suffering and is able, later, to describe what he's gone through, it means he was born for literature.

Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I'm a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death.

The darker the subject, the more light you must try to shed on the matter. And vice versa.

I identify as queer. I just don't know what any of these labels mean.

Having deadlines helps because people are constantly breathing down my neck, and tapping their toes waiting for pages. So I just have to work nine to five. If I didn't have deadlines then I might be more of a golden hour kind of guy, writing from eight to noon and calling it a day, but that's just not the way I work right now.

The more you go to a theatre and the more you hear stories you aren't necessarily familiar with, the more open you become.

I usually base my characters on composites of people I know. One trumpet player in SIDE MAN is really a mix of four different guys I knew growing up. Patsy , the waitress, is a mix of about three different people. I like doing it that way. I start with the characters, as opposed to plot, location, or some visual element. I write more by ear than by eye. I always work on the different sound of each character, trying to make sure each has a specific voice and speech pattern, which some writers could care less about.

I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.

I have to live with my decisions, whether you like them or not.

Writing is nothing less than thought transference, the ability to send one's ideas out into the world, beyond time and distance, taken at the value of the words, unbound from the speaker.

One way to make a positive out of a negative is that you can put it into your work.

The attacks on old words and the coining of new are the visible tip of the iceberg of change.

Sanity is an illusion caused by alcohol deficiency.

You can't break my heart. It's made of water.

Death ends a life, it does not end a relationship.

Frankly, seeing my plays with an audience is something I do with gritted teeth; I find the experience very difficult. I love the moment when you have just the dress rehearsal, when no one's there; that's kind of the peak to me. When people start filing in, I like to file out.

Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival.

Forgetting is the cost of living cheerfully.

I think all minority audiences watch movies with hope. They hope they will see what they want to see. That's why nobody really sees the same movie.

Every day, I learn something new. I think one of the most exciting things for a writer is to work on a TV show. It's like a novel. You have a really long time to develop and learn about the characters, and you can just really keep digging in deeper, every week.

What after all, is a halo? It's only one more thing to keep clean.

Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers - their stuff is so good and so strong.

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Yes, beef is what was for dinner last night. Tonight it will be my dinner, and it will continue to be.

I was a pretty heartbroken 13-year-old. That was the year my grandmother died and my parents split up.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

Laughter can bring a new perspective.

The Shakespeare Pro App is simply terrific and filled with loads of wonderful information!

It's not a meritocracy until everyone starts with the same opportunities, is it?

It is because the old have forgotten life that they preach wisdom.

In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time.

I suppose I walk that line between comedy and cruelty because I think one illuminates the other. We're all cruel, aren't we? We are all extreme in one way or another at times and that's what drama, since the Greeks, has dealt with.

Each of us as he receives his private trouncings at the hands of fate is kept in good heart by hearing of the moth in his brother's parachute and the scorpion in his neighbor's underwear.

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.

To teach successfully we must tell all we know, but only what is adaptable to the student.

The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being - that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet; the difference, to take an example from another sphere, between the idea of God in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Spinoza and the intuition of God in those of St. John of the Cross or Meister Eckhart - the difference between theory and experience.