Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 7

THE DYING GAUL is a Hollywood satire. But Hollywood is not the real subject matter here. My play uses that world of high-rolling big money - that crazy-making business - to examine a whole range of subjects.

Culture Clash is a national treasure.

Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

Wowers never speede well, that have a false harte.

Trying to lead an interesting life, a fruitful life, is a big challenge.

I write for young girls of color, for girls who don't even exist yet, so that there is something there for them when they arrive. I can only change how they live, not how they think.

I wrote my first play, Uncommon Women and Others, in the hopes of seeing an all-female curtain call in the basement of the Yale School of Drama. A man in the audience stood up during a post show discussion and announced, “I can't get into this, it's all about girls.” I thought to myself, “Well, I've been getting in to Hamlet and Laurence of Arabia my whole life, so you better start trying.”

One of the reasons I admire David Lindsay-Abaire's work is that he, like the Greeks I've spent so much of my professional life contemplating, is not afraid of taking on the big stuff - huge, human, moral issues - what do we owe to those we love?

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

To pronounce something clever and honest is not such a big deal, lots of them have been said and written. For a statement of truth to be effective and for it to make people wiser, it has to be filtered through the soul of a highest quality, the soul of an artist.

That was all and it was enough for me: fantasies are better left fantasies.

I was the family alien. Both my parents are quite creative, but I was... appalling... always putting on little shows. I was rather a shy child, not a natural performer, but there was a performative edge to everything I did.

Men and women of high professional standing have been reduced to the status of vagrants.

With madness, as with vomit, it's the passerby who receives the inconvenience.

I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result.

Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life.

I like creating the illusion that suddenly I've just done five things at once.

Women consume, and they must be directed what to consume, or they may identify you as lunch.

All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs.

Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.

Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible.

I realize that I am never going to grow up.

A puppet, for example, is just a piece of wood, a couple of rivets, but put them together, and if you know how to do it, and the audience's imagination joins in with this, then a miracle will come out of that machine. That is what we and the audience do in the theatre - we create miracles in that space.

I am trying to write a play that is big and I feel represents me - that's my big ambition.

Our self-love can be resigned to the sacrifice of everything but itself.

Home was always the place she went to when she had to start over.

I have decided to give up heterosexuality. I have decided that, while the project of altering the balance of power within heterosexual relationships is still a valid one, it is no longer one I can espouse--so to speak. There is no revolutionary hope for the heterosexual, and I have therefore decided to love myself and become a lesbian.

Good marriages are made in heaven. Or some such place.

Plays are architecture, and you can make them stand in many ways that are hard to describe. And, I think, in our limited ability to describe them, we've substituted our inarticulateness for saying that there's one and only one structure.

None is so blind as he who sees too much.

Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you.

Aging and death is what happens to everybody.

There was a jolly miller once, Lived on the River Dee; He worked and sang, from morn to night; No lark so blithe as he. And this the burden of his song, Forever used to be, "I care for nobody, not I, If no one cares for me.

Soldiers and peasants lived together on friendly terms; they knew each other and their everyday routines, and trusted each other; they shook their heads together over the war.

I love researching, I love interviewing.

Every good story is about who we are and our struggle to define ourselves.

Money does not make you happy but it quiets the nerves.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

Thou strange piece of wild nature!

For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.

From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.

In real life we don't know what's going to happen next. So how can you be that way on a stage? Being alive to the possibility of not knowing exactly how everything is going to happen next - if you can find places to have that happen onstage, it can resonate with an experience of living.

To me, strange is just another way of saying unusual. And unusual is just another way of saying special

We should never overestimate an audience's culture, but we should never underestimate their intelligence.

Shakespeare is God, of course. I have studied his plays for the vast majority of my sentient life. When I was a kid, my parents found an old copy of the LP recording of Richard Burton in John Gielgud's Broadway production of Hamlet and they gave it to me for my birthday. I listened to it till the grooves wore thin and I was off and running.

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'

But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce.

The weaker the country, the stronger the smile.

A play is a passion.

Let us celebrate the occasion with wine and sweet words.

I never feel like a smug or a smart-alec film director, and there are plenty of those around.

We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.

Beware the ridiculous. It will one day rule you.

Those not present are always wrong.

One man's poison ivy is another man's spinach.