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Quotes by Playwright
"I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along."
Play,
35
"At that moment of realization I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all."
35
"I know that my works are a credit to this nation and I dare say they will endure longer than the McCarran Act."
35
"For the only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as though it were something, just as the only way one can speak of God is to speak of him as though he were a man, which to be sure he was, in a sense, for a time, and as the only way one can speak of a man, even our anthropologists have realised that, is to speak of him as though he were a termite."
35
"I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door."
35
"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."
35
"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."
35
"Humanity's become a product and when humanity is a product, you get Auschwitz and you get Chair."
35
"Estragon: I remember the maps of the Holy Land. Coloured they were. Very pretty. The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty. That's where we'll go, I used to say, that's where we'll go for our honeymoon. We'll swim. We'll be happy."
35
"And if ever I'm reduced to looking for a meaning to my life, you never can tell, it's in that old mess I'll stick my nose to begin with, the mess of that poor old uniparous whore and myself the last of my foul brood, neither man nor beast."
35
"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."
35
"Hate is an automatic response to fear, for fear humiliates."
35
"He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world."
35
"A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to take it off of you."
35
"The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency."
34
"She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt."
34
"Show business offers more solid promises than Catholicism."
34
"The earth makes a sound as of sighs and the last drops fall from the emptied cloudless sky. A small boy, stretching out his hands and looking up at the blue sky, asked his mother how such a thing was possible. Fuck off, she said."
34
"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."
34
"We've managed to keep a spirit of fun, I guess, of urban satire and finding new and odd interesting angles to the ways of life to put on the stage."
34
"Nathan Lane always wanted to play Oscar. When he came in the first day, he already knew his lines. He said he'd known them since he was 18."
34
"It is salutary to train oneself to be no more affected by censure than by praise."
34
"I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong."
34
"After Proust, there are certain things that simply cannot be done again. He marks off for you the boundaries of your talent."
34
"I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school."
34
"Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples."
34
"I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far."
34
"Esteem must be founded on preference: to hold everyone in high esteem is to esteem nothing."
34
"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."
34
"You have to transmit to them what it's like being in the theater. And it has to come from somewhere inside you and not by being like what somebody did last year."
34
"It is easy to answer the ultimate questions - it saves you bothering with the immediate ones."
34
"Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts."
34
"We thought the church had withdrawn from interfering in Italian politics... but instead there is a terrible resurgence. These are ugly signs for freedom of expression."
34
"Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal."
34
"There is a method in man's wickedness; it grows up by degrees."
34
"I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet."
34
"We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?"
34
"Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance."
33
"Heroes, whatever high ideas we may have of them, are mortal and not divine. We are all as God made us and many of us much worse."
33
"Hope is the feeling that the feeling you have isn't permanent."
33
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