Top 116 Playwrights Quotes & Sayings

I've taken [acting] class with Larry Moss, who's more kind of in the theater world, so he's really educated me about playwrights.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.

I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.

Like most playwrights, I hate talkbacks with a passion that can burn a hole through hell.

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

Malcolm X is a person who has inspired - he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights.

When I was in school, I didn't get exposed to Latino playwrights.

It is such a joy to join a legacy of amazing female playwrights who have managed to break through the glass ceiling and reinvigorate the Broadway stage by bringing a fresh and necessary perspective.

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.

In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of then - they were very bad playwrights - were highly praised because their themes were intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship.

Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

I'm not one of those playwrights who says, 'Show up, hit your marks, and don't talk to me!' I always want to hear from the other artists involved, whether it's the director, the lighting tech, or the actors.

I love the theatre and Miller is one of my all-time favourite playwrights. 'All My Sons' is a very socialist play, which exposes the lack of empathy that can accompany capitalism when it is left unchecked.

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

You know, most good playwrights write seven good plays and then something happens and after that they're crap.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

Playwrights are the most gregarious writers - to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers.

Is the American theatre allowing itself to become irrelevant? The problem isn't that playwrights aren't being paid enough. It's that theatres all over America are looking towards New York to tell them what new plays to do.

I think more than anything, you should do what you love. If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.

In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.

If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.

Belonging to the Dramatists Guild Council where, with my fellow dramatists, I can directly affect (and protect) the professional lives of all American Playwrights has always made me feel that I am returning as much to the theatre as I withdraw. Because only playwrights can ensure the well-being of playwrights. No one else will do it for us.

Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.

Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.

... actors of the first water are not more plentiful than playwrights of genius.

Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.

There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.

I seem to belong to a boom moment of playwrights, and I'm always curious about how we all got here and what comes next.

The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.

As far as dramas are concerned, it's considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand.

I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.

Playwrights are naturally wary and protective - God, who's more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately.

if there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?

With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.

I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.

World Theatre Day is an important day for us, we get to applaud the efforts of renowned playwrights, actors, and directors who have put in toil and blood to create meaningful stories.

Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

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.

In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.

I am always looking for what piece, what artists, what playwrights, what directors, what subject matter is going to catalyze an audience.

Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.

I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.

When you think about it, what other playwrights are there besides O'Neill, Tennessee and me?

The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.

Tennessee Williams, one of my favorite playwrights, [lived] down there. You always heard about the Keys and how amazing they are and, well, it's like a highway with some bars on it.

We need theatre that is contemporary, lively and relevant, and the only way to do that is to take care of our playwrights and produce their plays.

As far as dramas are concerned, it's considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand

I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.

I know too many playwrights, or would-be playwrights, or would-have-been playwrights, that are around my age, who were bitter or have gone to something else because they got such a raw deal from critics, and some are quite wonderful writers.

Often, directors toss playwrights out of rehearsals.

San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.

Beckett was the most thorough of playwrights. He tells you what to do and if you've any humility at all, you'll take his advice.

I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do.