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Quotes by Playwright
"I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence."
36
"A man ninety years old was asked to what he attributed his longevity. I reckon, he said, with a twinkle in his eye, it because most nights I went to bed and slept when I should have sat up and worried."
36
"Democratic principles are the result of equality of condition."
36
"Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip."
36
"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."
36
"Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience."
36
"Personally of course I regret everything.Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need,not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy,not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust,not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear,not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly.An ordure, from beginning to end."
36
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
36
"Gradually I became aware of details: a company of French soldiers was marching through the streets of the town. They broke formation, and went in single file along the communication trench leading to the front line. Another group followed them."
36
"Joyce for all his devotion to his art, terrible in its austerity, was a lad born with a song on one side of him, a dance on the other; two gay guardian angels every human ought to have."
36
"Man is the only animal that learns by being hypocritical. He pretends to be polite and then, eventually, he becomes polite."
36
"A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate."
36
"Love's like the measles, all the worse when it comes late in life."
36
"He could breathe more freely in a lighter air. He was responsible only to himself for the things he did. Freedom! He was his own master at last. From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him."
36
"I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true."
36
"He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices."
36
"The history of mankind is the history of ideas."
36
"After being Turned Down by numerous Publishers, he had decided to write for Posterity."
36
"Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money."
36
"I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that."
36
"The revolution is like a vessel filled with the pulsating heartbeat of millions of working people."
36
"Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again."
36
"You can't have everything, I've often noticed it."
36
"It's hard not to be impatient with the absurdity of the young; they tell us that two and two make four as though it had never occurred to us, and they're disappointed if we can't share their surprise when they have discovered that a hen lays an egg. There's a lot of nonsense in their ranting and raving, but it's not all nonsense. One ought to sympathize with them; one ought to do one's best to understand. One has to remember how much has to be forgotten and how much has to be learnt when for the first time one faces life. It's not very easy to give up one's ideals, and the brute facts of every day are bitter pills to swallow. The spiritual conflicts of adolescence can be very severe and one can do little to resolve them."
36
"Soldiers and peasants lived together on friendly terms; they knew each other and their everyday routines, and trusted each other; they shook their heads together over the war."
35
"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime."
35
"Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
35
"He sometimes halted without saying anything. Either he had finally nothing to say or while having something to say he finally decided not to say it."
35
"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."
35
"If I live for another ten years I shall probably have written all that I want to write."
35
"We may seem competent, but by the end of next century there will be new deserts, new ruins."
35
"Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."
35
"Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible."
35
"Music is an art form. It is a way to wordlessly communicate."
35
"Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth."
35
"This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it."
35
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