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Quotes by Playwright

"Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy."

"Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits."

"I don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas."

"As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity."

"There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing."

"Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share."

"Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse."

"It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment."

"The Greeks said very, very extreme things in their tragedies."

"The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play."

"We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history."

"The first temptation, upon meeting an old friend after many years, is always to - look the other way."

"If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write."

"Violence is hidden within democratic structures because they are not radically democratic - Western democracy is merely a domestic convenience of consumerism."

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

"Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget."

"I don't think it's the job of theatre at the moment to provide political propaganda; that would be simplistic. We have to explore our situation further before we will understand it."

"But truth is most likely to be exhibited by the general sense of contemporaries, when the feelings of the heart can be expressed without suffering itself to be disguised by the prejudices of man."

"With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy."

"It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly."

"It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion."

"Music is an art form. It is a way to wordlessly communicate."

"The modern form of things had begun to appeal to me, also (as material for satire) politics, and the lives of the great and little, high up in the social scale."

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

"Pity those who nature abuses; never those who abuse nature."

"One of the local reporters assured me Garrison would put in an appearance for the cross-examination, but as the courtroom settled down and the rear doors were closed, there was no sign of him."

"No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today."

"Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money."

"I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden."

"There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief."

"Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience."

"To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?"

"He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure."

"Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly."

"If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right."

"Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."

"Nathan Lane always wanted to play Oscar. When he came in the first day, he already knew his lines. He said he'd known them since he was 18."

"At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all."

"That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you'll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed."
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