top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Playwright
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
40
"What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play."
40
"Each of us, face to face with other men, is clothed with some sort of dignity, but we know only too well all the unspeakable things that go on in the heart."
40
"PAYE means pay as you earn but it could also mean Pretty Accurate Yet Estimated."
40
"Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share."
39
"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."
39
"I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know."
39
"Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock."
39
"It is not true that drink changes a man's character. It may reveal it more clearly."
39
"I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored."
39
"In my plays I want to look at life - at the commonplace of existence-as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."
39
"Lay this unto your breast: Old friends, like old swords, still are trusted best."
39
"What we're dealt with hopefully is two arms, two eyes, two legs, a head, a heart. The variations, the extensions, the possibilities of the human body, what that can do."
39
"Then in college I became obsessed with film, and wanted to be part of that."
39
"But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews."
39
"The more I do in my life, the more I can write music about new experiences."
39
"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."
39
"The world is quickly bored by the recital of misfortune, and willing avoids the sight of distress."
39
"He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid."
39
"And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present."
39
"How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel."
Life,
39
"It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
39
"It is widely held that too much wine will dull a man's desire. Indeed it will in a dull man."
39
"I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did."
39
"We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it."
39
"Neither of us mentioned him when we woke on the morning after his death...One is not jealous of the dead, and it seemed easy to me that morning to take up our old life together."
39
"Interest makes some people blind, and others quick-sighted."
39
"All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language."
39
"The end is in the beginning and yet you go on."
39
"CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that."
39
"Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally."
39
"When the grandmothers of today hear the word "Chippendales," they don't necessary think of chairs."
39
"The human mind is a dramatic structure in itself and our society is absolutely saturated with drama."
39
"Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it."
39
"It is right that he too should have his little chronicle, his memories, his reason, and be able to recognize the good in the bad, the bad in the worst, and so grow gently old down all the unchanging days, and die one day like any other day, only shorter."
39
"Hatred seems to work on the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?"
39
"I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life."
39
"The essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of the hero."
39
"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."
39
"Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so. What separated a German mother from a French mother?"
38
"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."
38
"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."
38
bottom of page