Top 944 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Playwrights - Page 9

Since it's based on my parents, it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them.

In America, we have anti-nepotism laws in the federal government and in lots of state governments, because the practice of hiring relatives undermines public confidence that the government official is actually finding best person for the job.

I have a theory about Ireland, being at the edge of Europe. For 1,000 years, people didn't know what was beyond. But we thought about it - a lot. And that 'beyond' became internalized in our psyche.

I think there is no world without theatre.

Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes

I definitely people-watch. I often see photos of myself with my children: I'm always in the background with my mouth wide open, looking somewhere else.

As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's 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. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.

One [of the two ideas for PROOF] was to write about two sisters who are quarreling over the legacy of something left behind by their father. The other was about someone who knew that her parent had had problems of mental illness [and that] she might be going through the same thing.

That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass, To untell the days.

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.

I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays.

It's risky in a marriage for a man to come home too late, but it can sometimes pose an even greater risk if he comes home too early.

Scientists have determined that the most irritating sound to the human ear is the sound of a knife cutting a glass bottle. And the second-worst sound is a fork scratching a glass bottle. Evidently they did all their research at the Picnic for Morons.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

My theater has always been a political battle on the stage.

If people had no fear, you'd hardly need to have to teach them. It's the fear that screws everything up.

You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of.

If you must have motivation, think of your paycheck on Friday.

As a writer, I'm limitless.

A wedding invitation is a gift subpoena.

Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.

I was a very self-righteous 15-25 year old. Anyway, I wake up every morning and thank God I'm not a kid anymore.

I'm very much inspired by the Latin music, especially the romantic boleros. Not that when I sit to write a play I listen to boleros. But I think it's part of my DNA, it's part of my upbringing. I grew up in a house where this is the kind of music my parents used to listen to. This is the kind of music I would even hear in my neighborhood. I think that sort of romanticism is part of the culture.

The problem in the world is the oppression of man by man; it this which threatens existence.

The arts are a green industry with a very high rate of return. This is not money thrown away by any stretch of the imagination. This is money that creates jobs. This is money that brings life, financial life, to communities.

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

Music is the great cheer-up in the language of all countries.

What my research told me is that a psychopath cannot change. You're born like that.

While we pursue the unattainable, we make impossible the realizable.

There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism.

People want to put women in one box, and I'm interested in how women can be everything at once.

I've worked really hard, but I know people who have worked even harder but didn't have the chances I've had.

When you start at the beginning of your career [that] was really focused on your own needs and obstacles, and ultimately you realize you're not really doing it for yourself.

If one is of the masculine gender, a poodle is the insignia of one's deviation.

If you can no longer think about the future, and you once dreamed of everlasting love, don't give up the dream, find it again.

The title's so upfront. It gives fair warning about the play's content. I'm writing about a kind of disenchantment, an anger, but quite a cool 90's anger, at a time when we're not very good at openly being angry. . . . I don't think I ever thought the title was titillating. I thought it was incredibly catchy. If the play is about the reduction in human relations down to a consumerist rationale, then thematically, the title is entirely linked into the thesis of the play.

I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World,' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story.

In oratory the will must predominate.

One should eat to live, not live to eat.

In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall - that when the play is finished, it's done - but now I realise it's more like gardening; you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living.

Art pulls a community together... Art makes you feel differently. That's what artists are doing all the time, shifting and changing the way you see life.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

It's always such a joy that you wake up in the morning and there's work to do.

Many movies about people recovering, moving on, and redeeming themselves are really wonderful and inspiring. But I think the more sentimental ones that are less good make me feel isolated - like, if you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps like the guys in the movies, there is something wrong with you. That's a shame.

There are two kinds of marriages - where the husband quotes the wife and where the wife quotes the husband.

Criticism is easy, art is difficult.

Sex - the poor man's polo.

I am sorie God made me so comely.

He who talks much cannot talk well.

I am myself of a mixed background.

When you're making art, there's a lot of self-importance attached to that, but at the end of the day, you can always fall back on the fact that it's just a play. It's not like the Iraq War or something. We're not causing anybody any harm, other than a couple hours of a wasted evening.

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

Drive away what springs from nature; it returns at a gallop.

There is no forgiveness in nature.

We have this myth that if you work hard, you can accomplish anything. It's not a very American thing to say, but I don't think that's true. It's true for a lot of people, but you need other things to succeed. You need luck, you need opportunity, and you need the life skills to recognize what an opportunity is.

All experience helps when you write.

To be good to yourself ... Sometimes it seems that takes a special talent all its own.

The true way to gain much, is never to desire to gain too much.