Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 8
Explore popular quotes by famous playwrights.
The idea of a rupture between acts occurs in a number of my plays.
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
On the one hand, I'm grateful to be hired and thrilled to be paid.
At the end of every road you meet yourself.
Things always happen in series.
Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy.
The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less.
The thing about having a very young audience in the theatre is that sometimes they laugh at the bullying scenes. It's really interesting, what that means. It still confuses me slightly, you know; someone's getting quite brutally bullied on stage and people are laughing. I think it's very hard being young.
In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts.
I see procrastination and research as part of my artistic process.
The world doesn't see a lot of gray. The world sees black and white, and then it understands.
There is love of course. And then there's life, its enemy.
The nature of the beast is that film is a director's medium. It's not a Tracy Letts play, it's a John Wells film. 'August: Osage County,' as a play, is done. Written. On the shelf. It'll be performed in its entirety for years.
If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women.
When people say 'Lysistrata' has always been seen as an anti-war play, what's interesting is to not make it an anti-war play, because I actually think there are important times to go to war in this world. That's just the reality. But what's interesting is the not caring.
Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts.
Don't cook that chicken - it still has feathers.
We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.
I'm not a brand name, I'm a person.
Work is much more fun than fun.
How happy is the sailor's life, from coast to coast to roam; in every port he finds a wife, in every land a home.
It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales!
If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it's just possible you haven't grasped the situation.
It is far more honest to be undeservedly ignored than to be honoured without merit.
Art gives us the opportunity to have clarity as well as hope that we might be able to survive a situation, or hope that we can find a way out of it without too much more injury to ourselves.
Our Southern brethren have done grievously, they have rebelled and have attacked their father's house and their loyal brothers. They must be punished and brought back, but this necessity breaks my heart.
We have a desperate need for producers in the [commercial Broadway] theatre, and it is very hard for them to get money and find investors for new plays.
In Las Vegas, nothing ends very well.
He’s a pagan! I’m an artist! We’re naturally sympathetic!
Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.
None of us really grow up. All we ever do is learn how to behave in public.
Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process.
I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again.
Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Well, the tyranny of masculinity and the tyranny of patriarchy I think has been much more deadly to men than it has to women. It hasn't killed our hearts. It's killed men's hearts. It's silenced them; it's cut them off.
'Fall on Your Knees' is really a story about secrets and family, and the idea that there are some stories or truths that need to be expressed.
Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep.
When we play the part of a great man too much, we seem very small.
I think that the Pulitzer Prize is definitely a blessing, but it's also a curse. Because I think that it is a blessing because the work gets more exposure, especially that particular play and then other works of yours too. And then it's a curse because people anticipate that you will write something like you've already written. I think it's really wrong because, you know, I think, as a writer, I'm in a process and I'm somewhere in that process, and I need to continue to develop.
I always crave to see more stories about and by people of color, particularly new work by young black writers.
You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy.
Minds are like flowers. If you let it sit there without soaking anything up, it will dry up.
If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond.
Our entire life - consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.
I deliberately look for colorful people. They're very right for theatre. Theatre has to be theatrical. If you can get color into the accountant, you've got something. Write the whole thing first and then say he's an accountant. That's a very wacky accountant, but so what? Theatricality feeds and challenges the actor, the director, and the designers.
I get excited by landscape.
The absurdist is concerned with the search for meaning in the Universe. He believes this search to be meaningless--hence the disintegration of plot, character, and language in absurdist drama. Order is a falsehood that we, God, those who came before us, have imposed on a random universe. However, the absurdist is confronted with a curious paradox: though he believes the Universe to be meaningless, he cannot abandon the search for meaning--or he will die.
Everyone praises the views you get from mountain tops, but no one talks about the views that they block.
I do choose to write for a living - in addition to writing plays. I no longer write sitcoms, and I no longer feel shame.
At the time of Caliph Omar's invasion of Egypt, the Arab officer on duty in the destruction of the library of Alexandria used two stamps with which he marked the books. One said: 'Does not agree with the Koran - heretic, must be burned'. The other said: 'Agrees with the Koran - superfluous, must be burned'.
I grew up reading comic books. Super hero comic books, Archie comic books, horror comic books, you name it.
Regarding pushing the form, ideas interest me more than form. I think you can write a very subversive play in a three-act structure. The content makes the play. I feel the form is simply dressing, because ultimately, you want to communicate to the audience, and sometimes the best way to do that is to present a provocative idea in a format that is comfortable for them to receive. Then the idea will come through directly, right in solar plexus. After all, I want to make a living as an artist, and that means speaking to the audience in a form they can understand.
I'm anxious about work, the future, friendships, past relationships... I'm just one of those people that, whatever I'm doing, it's a big worry.
I believe in entertainment. I love entertainment. But I love it with a purpose. I want people to come out thinking about what they saw, and perhaps reassessing what's happening in their own lives with their families.
The categories of A-minus through C-plus [films] are completely dominated by Hollywood.
Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.
In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called 'White Feathers.' It was produced in the studio theatre at the students' union in early 1999, when I was 21. It's 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
The Pulitzer has nothing to do with me; it's more about people's perceptions of me, whatever they may be. I'm not being humble - I honestly do not and cannot think about that. It's a lovely piece of crystal on my bookcase, but that's all it is to me.
Virtue looks good but it only suits imposing figures.
I keep endlessly busy with all kinds of stuff, mostly horses, cattle, livestock, things like that.
