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Quotes by Playwright
"James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can."
18
"Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from."
18
"Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides."
18
"We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much?"
18
"In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera."
18
"We are merely the stars tennis-balls, struck and bandied which way please them."
18
"My plays are made up of long monologues, which is similar to prose working with the language."
18
"Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe. If you believe, clap your hands!"
17
"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."
17
"Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant."
17
"I had met a young lady who wanted to be in the theater. It was Judy Holliday. She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today."
16
"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."
Pen,
16
"Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending."
16
"You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God."
16
"Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like."
16
"Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough, You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
16
"The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less."
16
"I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them."
15
"Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
15
"It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it."
15
"The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed."
15
"This liberty will look easy by and by when nobody dies to get it."
15
"Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way."
15
"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."
15
"Unmarried couples should get married - that's an excellent tax avoidance measure, if a bit drastic."
15
"How happy I am to go to the front at last. To do my bit. To prove with my life what I think I feel."
Life,
15
"All the world's a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed."
15
"In a way, the American side descended to Saddam's level, which happens often in these types of circumstances. That is why the people in Iraq do not accept the current state of affairs."
15
"A superfluity of wealth, and a train of domestic slaves, naturally banish a sense of general liberty, and nourish the seeds of that kind of independence that usually terminates in aristocracy."
15
"Who cares about great marks left behind? We have one life... just one. Our life. We have nothing else."
15
"You can do anything in this world if you are prepared to take the consequences."
15
"When you are forty, half of you belongs to the past... And when you are seventy, nearly all of you."
Past,
15
"Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over."
15
"I know My God commands, whose power no power resists."
15
"Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value."
14
"Tragedy is restful: and the reason is that hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it."
14
"I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak."
14
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