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Quotes by Playwright
"That was luck: I should not then have been a conscientious objector; but I am quite sure that the abominations of war would have made me one, as soon as I got to the front."
War,
10
"You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by."
10
"American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers."
10
"Every man who is high up likes to think that he has done it all himself, and the wife smiles and lets it go at that."
10
"How can I be reasonable? To me our love was everything and you were my whole life. It is not very pleasant to realize that to you it was only an episode."
10
"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."
10
"If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn't write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy."
10
"After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent."
10
"Man is most happy, when his own actions are arguments and examples of his virtue."
10
"Innocence is a kind of insanity."
10
"Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it."
10
"I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far."
10
"For in me there have always been two fools, among others, one asking nothing better than to stay where he is and the other imagining that life might be slightly less horrible a little further on. So that I was never disappointed, so to speak, whatever I did, in this domain. And these inseparable fools I indulged turn about, that they might understand their foolishness."
10
"Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it."
10
"A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don't find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting."
10
"Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid."
10
"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."
10
"There are dreams which belong only partly in the unconscious; these are the dreams we remember on waking so vividly that we deliberately continue them, and so fall asleep again and wake and sleep and the dream goes on without interruption, with a thread of logic the pure dream doesn't possess."
10
"This was hell then, it wasn't anything to worry about: it was just his own familiar room."
10
"Does any art have a practical value? People love to talk about how expensive a painting is. That's the only way we can talk about paintings in this century."
10
"There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless."
10
"I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."
10
"Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally."
10
"The hallway of every man's life is paced with pictures; pictures gay and pictures gloomy, all useful, for if we be wise, we can learn from them a richer and braver way to live."
10
"He was not crying for the pain they had caused him, nor for the humiliation he had suffered when they looked at his foot, but with rage at himself because, unable to stand the torture, he had put out his foot of his own accord."
10
"It could draw from a greater reservoir of freedom. The irony could develop an even greater ease."
10
"American future lies in the East. The great free markets of the Pacific Rim are the American destiny."
10
"I write plays not to make money, but to stop myself from going mad. Because it's my way of making the world rational to me."
10
"I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself."
10
"I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet."
10
"You know what the critics are. If you tell the truth they only say you're cynical and it does an author no good to get a reputation for cynicism."
10
"All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other."
10
"Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you."
10
"In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old."
10
"He who never leaves his country is full of prejudices."
10
"Life isn't long enough for love and art."
10
"We are all born mad. Some remain so."
10
"The best part of one's life is the working part, the creative part. Believe me, I love to succeed... However, the real spiritual and emotional excitement is in the doing."
10
"But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu..."
10
"Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure."
10
"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
10
"For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them."
10
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