Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 2

Prithee don't screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners.

You can tell a lot about a person by the people who work for them.

Writing is 90% procrastination. It is a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write.

I never graduated to being an atheist. I only graduated to being an agnostic.

I don't enjoy hearing the sound of my voice. The most important things for me are impossible to articulate extemporaneously.

From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?

I think of events like the Challenger and 9/11 - events that move us so much that we never quite get over them. So it's important to go back and relive those feelings in order to remember how important those events were to us.

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

Food is your body's fuel. Without fuel, your body wants to shut down.

We know so little of the why, what the universe is, what infinity is. The veil around us is very fragile.

Death comes for us all. Even for kings he comes.

I don't think I'll ever stop writing. I write almost every day. I'd write plays even if they were never done again. You're at the mercy of whatever talent you have.

Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

Theatre within theatre, when characters sees themselves on stage, always raises philosophical questions of choice and free will.

In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, grounds for marriage.

The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience's eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience 'right now.'

The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste.

I am so far as I am aware not at all influenced by dramatists, expect for Shakespeare, who I have to say, it is impossible not to be influenced by if you hold language to be the major element of theatre.

Cheating is not the American way. It is small, while we are large. It is cheap, while we are richly endowed. It is destructive, while we are creative. It is doomed to fail, while our gifts and responsibilities call us to achieve. It sabotages trust and weakens the bonds of spirit and humanity, without which we perish.

Musicals and horror movies are my two favorite genres because they're about extremes.

I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.

I think it's a very ephemeral thing, what makes a show a success.

I love writing. It makes me so happy.

He really is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates.

I have a really, really difficult time with dramaturgy sometimes in America, because I write about other cultures. I write about a culture that is very difficult, it is very foreign to a North American. A lot of people don't know about what's happening.

The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it.

The only thing to know is how to use your neurosis.

Fate is a manifestation of natural causes. That's it. It's not a conscious entity. It has no plan.

The only thing that matters is what you do now, here.

The good thing is that life is sometimes a work in progress.

We all come from our own little planets. That's why we're all different. That's what makes life interesting.

Amateurs hope, professionals work.

Young men who have been away, been to war, they are different when they come home.

It is much more exquisite to be blown from the tree as a flower than to be shaken down as a shriveled and bitter fruit.

Life shouldn't be printed on dollar bills.

Advances in technology will continue to reach far into every sector of our economy. Future job and economic growth in industry, defense, transportation, agriculture, health care, and life sciences is directly related to scientific advancement.

God made man in his own image, and man returned the favour.

All my family, my blood, is mixed up now. They don't even all know each other. I just hope they don't never hate or fight each other, not knowin who they are. Cause all these people livin are brothers and sisters and cousins. All these beautiful different colors! We!... We the human Family. God says so! FAMILY!

I always thought that the location of this film [Girl In The Train] was on the train and inside her imagination, and her loneliness and her gaze out the window.Although it was set in England, it didn't feel to me like an overly English book. In terms of the use of cultural references, it was not extreme, so it was very simple to go from England to America in the adaptation.

Easier to climb up, than to just hang on.

I want to seduce the audience. If they can go along for a ride they wouldn't ordinarily take, or don't even know they're taking, then they might see highly charged political issues in a new and unexpected way. . . . The theatre is now so afraid to face its social demons that we've given that responsibility over to film. But it will always be harder to deal with certain issues in the theatre. The live event - being watched by people as we watch - makes it seem all the more dangerous.

There hath grown no grass on my heels since I went hence.

It's absolutely essential for every generation to capture that social responsibility. Injustice grows like weeds. The injustices of the world are like weeds, and if you do nothing they'll choke your whole garden, man.

Hope! thou nurse of young desire.

Women like silent men. They think they're listening.

I am one of the 11.5% of New Yorkers who remain traumatized by the events of September 11.

You can be a good neighbor only if you have good neighbors.

We've managed to keep a spirit of fun, I guess, of urban satire and finding new and odd interesting angles to the ways of life to put on the stage.

Content's a kingdom, and I wear that crown.

Basically I was a theatre fanatic. I had a job with Home Box Office as a theatre consultant for a long time.

Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.

The Theatre of the Absurd is a theatrical embodiment and manifestation of existentialism. It is part reality and part nightmare

Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.

Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them.

Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.

Memories are nothing but the lash with which yesterday flogs tomorrow.

Truth is truth, though from an enemy, and spoken in malice.

Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.