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Quotes by Playwright
"The true way to gain much, is never to desire to gain too much."
37
"How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life."
37
"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."
37
"Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money."
37
"The world is a beautiful book, but of little use to him who cannot read it."
37
"Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."
37
"To live happily with other people, ask of them only what they can give."
37
"You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true."
37
"In an instant all will vanish and we'll be alone once more, in the midst of nothingness."
37
"To insure peace of mind ignore the rules and regulations."
37
"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."
37
"Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age when no man dies for love except upon the stage."
37
"Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing."
37
"When humanness is lost the radical difference between the bodies in the pit and people walking on the street is lost."
37
"For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food to satisfy my small appetite, a room to myself, books from a public library, pens and paper, I should regret nothing."
37
"A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back."
37
"The working class will not halt until socialism has been realized."
37
"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."
37
"When I penetrate into that house, if I ever do, it will be to go on turning, faster and faster, more and more convulsive, like a constipated dog, or one suffering from worms, overturning furniture, in the midst of my family all trying to embrace me at once, until by virtue of a supreme spasm I am catapulted in the opposite direction and gradually leave backwards, without having said good evening."
37
"The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read."
37
"Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."
37
"What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all."
37
"The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism."
37
"Then I went off to Southern Methodist University in Dallas. They had a really wonderful theatre department."
37
"For the last half of my life I have had the doubtful benefit of a brother whose literary reputation is much greater than my own."
37
"Rocinante was of more value for a true traveller than a jet plane. Jet planes were for business men."
37
"The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi."
37
"As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times."
37
"Books are men of higher stature; the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear."
37
"I believe absolutely in love being the central motive force of the universe."
37
"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."
37
"Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement."
37
"Why did you look at the sunset?'Philip answered with his mouth full:Because I was happy."
37
"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."
36
"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."
36
"Dying for dark - the darker the worse. Strange."
36
"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."
36
"There's a lot of bad isms floating around this world, but one of the worst is commercialism."
36
"I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence."
36
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