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Quotes by Playwright
"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
"And the spirit of revolution will not die while the hearts of these workers continue to beat."
33
"If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet."
33
"I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky."
33
"Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases."
Love,
33
"If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right."
33
"The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes."
33
"Even at our birth, death does but stand aside a little. And every day he looks towards us and muses somewhat to himself whether that day or the next he will draw nigh."
33
"I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily."
33
"It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the "fronts" people assume before one another's eyes, and the "front" a writer puts on the face of reality."
33
"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable."
33
"Fifteen years ago I walked out of a production of one of my plays at the RSC because I decided it was a waste of time."
33
"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."
33
"Seems like God don't see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams - but He did give us children to make them dreams seem worthwhile."
33
"Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature."
33
"There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are."
33
"Unfathomable mind: now beacon, now sea."
33
"Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid."
33
"When I was a boy, unconsciously, spontaneously I learned the art of telling ironic stories."
Art,
33
"Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything."
33
"He was a god, such as men might be, if men were gods."
33
"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead."
32
"When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line."
32
"My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative."
32
"Imagination is the wide-open eye which leads us always to see truth more vividly."
32
"To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool."
32
"The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment."
32
"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
32
"The only thing that separates us from the animals is our ability to accessorize."
32
"Avoiding humiliation is the core of tragedy and comedy."
32
"Often the best way to overcome desire is to satisfy it."
32
"You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by."
32
"One of the most difficult things to contend with in a hospital is that assumption on the part of the staff that because you have lost your gall bladder you have also lost your mind."
Mind,
32
"The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely."
32
"It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales!"
32
"Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents."
32
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