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Quotes by Playwright
"She got up and he saw the skin of her thigh for a moment above the artificial silk, and a prick of sexual desire disturbed him like a sickness. That was what happened to a man in the end: the stuffy room, the wakeful children, the Saturday night movements from the other bed. Was there no escape""anywhere""for anyone? It was worth murdering a world."
11
"Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange."
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"There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism."
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"I had never thought of myself as a dramatist, and, for really good technical results, the thought came too late: a man of letters has become too wordy to write economically for the stage."
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"Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs."
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"I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England."
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"Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish."
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"In London, love and scandal are considered the best sweeteners of tea."
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"Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process."
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"You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return."
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"Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side."
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"I would have thought he would be there out of just plain curiosity. It was incredible that he was missing."
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"Ambition - it is the last infirmity of noble minds."
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"For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else."
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"Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible."
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"Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play."
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"People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do."
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"My father knew the charming side of my mother, and my mother thought that he was attentive and pleasant and was an architect, which was a respectable profession, but I don't think that they actually got to know one another deeply."
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"I'm very into the first production of the show."
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"That friend a great man's ruin strongly checks, who rails into his belief all his defects."
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"The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it."
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"To live happily with other people, ask of them only what they can give."
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"Let no man fear to die, we love to sleep all, and death is but the sounder sleep."
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"Then in college I became obsessed with film, and wanted to be part of that."
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"As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional."
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"Whatever the economy needs to maintain itself, the government will do it."
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"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."
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"A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative."
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"Then, when I was a senior in high school, I was kind of bereft and she put me in an acting class."
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"There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime."
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"Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age when no man dies for love except upon the stage."
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"The conditions of writing change absolutely between the first novel and the second: the first is an adventure, the second is a duty. The first is like a sprint which leaves you exhausted and triumphant beside the track. With the second the writer has been transformed into a long-distance runner - the finishing tape is out of sight, at the end of life. He must guard his energies and plan ahead. A long endurance is more exhausting than a sprint, and less heroic."
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"I make mistakes; I'll be the second to admit it."
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"I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character."
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"Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite."
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"It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection."
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"It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales!"
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"Sometimes just getting out of the house and doing something you haven't done in a long time (or never done!) can open up the doors to musical inspiration."
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"The real reason for comedy is to hide the pain."
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"The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read."
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"There's no such thing, you know, as picking out the best woman: it's only a question of comparative badness, brother."
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"The ballet makes us look at those bodies, it makes us listen to that music, it makes us wonder at the geometry, of the way they come together. The way that extraordinary space is controlled and given such emotional force."
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"A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that "ancient institution" the old one."
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"Boys my age with whom, in spite of everything, I was obliged to mix occasionally, mocked me."
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