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Quotes by Playwright
"I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'."
12
"People ask for criticism, but they only want praise."
12
"It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!"
12
"Do you know how helpless you feel if you have a full cup of coffee in your hand and you start to sneeze?"
12
"He had always despised people who thought about the past. To live was to leave behind, to be as free as a shipwrecked man who has lost everything."
12
"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."
12
"It is the sincerest thing I have written, caught by the drama of a soul struggling in the contrary toils of love and religion - death brought them into harmony."
12
"Then I went off to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They had a really wonderful theatre department."
12
"He couldn't tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch."
12
"I am one of the 11.5% of New Yorkers who remain traumatized by the events of September 11."
12
"One always spoke of her like that in the third person as though she were not there. Sometimes she seemed invisible like peace."
12
"The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality."
12
"The sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature."
12
"No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found."
12
"I can't go on. I'll go on."
12
"Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable."
12
"He did not care if she was heartless, vicious and vulgar, stupid and grasping, he loved her. He would rather have misery with one than happiness with the other."
12
"Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human."
12
"As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times."
12
"Switzerland is only bearable covered with snow," Aunt Augusta said, "like some people are only bearable under a sheet."
12
"I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything."
12
"Every man, through fear, mugs his aspirations a dozen times a day."
12
"I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe."
12
"Nevertheless, the mode, the justification, and all the games involved in this war were dishonest."
12
"It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses."
12
"Never pause unless you have a reason for it, but when you pause, pause as long as you can."
12
"After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity."
12
"Words are the clothes thoughts wear."
12
"I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened."
12
"What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play."
12
"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."
12
"Nothing but heaven itself is better than a friend who is really a friend."
12
"Go on - but don't think you can kill my confidence. I've had experts doing it for years."
12
"As a main ingredient to the show, it has to have truth, represent truth, or else it won't last."
12
"Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss."
Hell,
12
"Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul."
12
"I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history."
12
"We do not write as we want but as we can."
12
"Since it's based on my parents, it's more emotionally close to me than some of my more surreal plays. And then I like the balance of the comic and the sad. It should play as funny, but you should care about the characters and feel sad for them."
11
"The insufferable arrogance of human beings to think that Nature was made solely for their benefit, as if it was conceivable that the sun had been set afire merely to ripen men's apples and head their cabbages."
11
"Money will never make you happy and happy will never make you money."
11
"Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor."
11
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