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Quotes by Dramatist
"A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute."
May,
35
"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare."
35
"To learn is not to know; there are the learners and the learned. Memory makes the one, philosophy the others."
35
"I look upon it as a Point of Morality, to be obliged by those who endeavour to oblige me."
35
"The product of the artist has become less important than the fact of the artist. We wish to absorb this person. We wish to devour someone who has experienced the tragic. In our society this person is much more important than anything he might create."
35
"I am not my body. My body is nothing without me."
35
"Well, I must do't. Away, my disposition, and possess me Some harlot's spirit! My throat of war be turn'd, Which quier'd with my drum, into a pipe Small as an eunuch, or the virgin voice That babies lull asleep! The smiles of knaves Tent in my cheeks, and schoolboys' tears take up The glasses of my sight! A beggar's tongue Make motion through my lips, and my arm'd knees, Who bow'd but in my stirrup, bend like his That hath receiv'd an alms! I will not do't, Lest I surcease to honor mine own truth, And by my body's action teach my mind A most inherent baseness."
35
"Raise your eyes and count the small gang of your oppressors who are only strong through the blood they suck from you and through your arms which you lend them unwillingly."
35
"I want to support the whole idea of the humanities and teaching the humanities as being something that - even if it can't be quantitatively measured as other subjects - it's as fundamental to all education."
35
"Some people are so fond of ill luck that they run halfway to meet it."
35
"The most difficult secret for a man to keep is his own opinion of himself."
35
"He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural."
34
"Every body about me seem'd happy but every body seem'd in a hurry to be happy somewhere else."
Body,
34
"Whatever happened to the good old days: you know, dirty attics, tuberculosis and general all-round suffering?"
34
"I wrote because I had to. I couldn't stop. There wasn't anything else I could do. If no one ever bought anything anything I ever did I'd still be writing. It's beyond a compulsion."
34
"When I invite a woman to dinner, I expect her to look at my face. That's the price she has to pay."
34
"It's not a pretty face, I grant you. But underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character."
34
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
34
"The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray."
34
"It is not good to see people who have been pretending strength all their lives lose it even for a minute."
34
"If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama."
34
"Coughing in the theater is not a respiratory ailment. It is a criticism."
34
"I say there is no darkness but ignorance."
34
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go."
33
"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy But not express'd in fancy rich not gaudy For the apparel oft proclaims the man."
33
"So heavy is the chain of wedlock that it needs two to carry it and sometimes three."
33
"He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about."
33
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