top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Playwright
"I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper."
15
"Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate."
15
"Beauty is an ecstacy it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it."
15
"I want to look at life - at the commonplaces of existence - as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."
15
"No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year."
15
"The history of mankind is the history of ideas."
15
"Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful."
15
"Inspiration is a farce that poets have invented to give themselves importance."
15
"The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability."
15
"My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization."
15
"New landscapes, new customs. The accumulation of memories. A long life is not a question of years. A man without memories might reach the age of a hundred and feel that his life had been a very brief one."
15
"Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which on hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."
15
"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."
15
"What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes."
15
"From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything."
Time,
15
"My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak."
15
"I can't talk you in terms of time --your time and my time are different."
15
"My brother used to say that I wrote faster than he could read. He wrote two books - of poems - better than all mine put together."
15
"I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other."
14
"Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time."
14
"Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth."
14
"I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second."
14
"I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles."
14
"The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency."
14
"It is not time for mirth and laughter, the cold, gray dawn of the morning after."
14
"Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct."
14
"The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive."
14
"Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity."
14
"A man never feels more important than when he receives a telegram containing more than ten words."
14
"Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award."
14
"He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong."
14
"Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."
14
"Democratic principles are the result of equality of condition."
14
"I think there's something degrading about having a husband for a rival. It's humiliating if you fail and commonplace if you succeed."
14
"I would gladly do it but I am suffering from social phobia. I cannot manage being in a crowd of people."
14
"A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in."
14
"There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make."
14
"To insure peace of mind ignore the rules and regulations."
14
"In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream."
14
"You must go on.I can't go on.I'll go on."
14
"I still think that if the human race, or even one nation, could only get right about its God the rest would follow."
14
bottom of page