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Quotes by Playwright
"Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull."
9
"Men and women of high professional standing have been reduced to the status of vagrants."
9
"How silly men were! Their part in procreation was so unimportant; it was the woman who carried the child through long months of uneasiness and bore it with pain, and yet a man because of his momentary connection made such preposterous claims. Why should that make any difference to him in his feelings towards the child?"
9
"The end is in the beginning and yet you go on."
9
"They comedifferent and the samewith each it is different and the samewith each the absence of love is differentwith each the absence of love is the same."
9
"We thought the church had withdrawn from interfering in Italian politics...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."
9
"I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre."
9
"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible."
9
"All you now do is pursue your private objectives within society. Instead of us being a community, everybody is asked to seek their own personal ends. It's called competition. And competition is antagonism."
9
"One night some short weeks ago, for the first time in her not always happy life, Marilyn Monroe's soul sat down alone to a quiet supper from which it did not rise."
9
"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."
9
"I know that I shall die struggling for breath, and I know that I shall be horribly afraid. I know that I shall not be able to keep myself from regretting bitterly the life that has brought me to such a pass; but I disown that regret. I now, weak, old, diseased, poor, dying, hold still my soul in my hands, and I regret nothing."
9
"PAYE means pay as you earn but it could also mean Pretty Accurate Yet Estimated."
9
"All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead."
8
"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."
8
"Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God."
8
"God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December."
8
"If you want to eat well in England, eat three breakfasts."
8
"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."
8
"One-half of life is luck; the other half is discipline - and that's the important half, for without discipline you wouldn't know what to do with luck."
8
"I'd the upbringing a nun would envy. Until I was fifteen I was more familiar with Africa than my own body."
8
"I was out of sorts. They are deep, my sorts, a deep ditch, and I am not often out of them."
8
"Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to."
8
"If you engage people on a vital, important level, they will respond."
8
"He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work, because if he isn't he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts."
8
"No human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another's happiness."
8
"When I give a lecture, I accept that people look at their watches, but what I do not tolerate is when they look at it and raise it to their ear to find out if it stopped."
8
"Had a couple of drinks by myself. It was a mistake. Have I got to give up drinking, too? If I eliminate everything, how will I exist? I was somebody who loved Maurice and went with men and enjoyed my drinks. What happens if you drop all the things that make you I?"
8
"Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing."
8
"Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, like diamonds we are cut with our own dust."
8
"Sometimes I want to clean up my desk and go out and say, respect me, I'm a respectable grown-up, and other times I just want to jump into a paper bag and shake and bake myself to death."
8
"Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents."
8
"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."
8
"There are three secrets to writing a novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are."
8
"Women never have young minds. They were born three thousand years old."
8
"A man does not automatically become a public figure because he happens to build an empire out of chicken fat."
8
"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."
8
"The New York City Ballet is always about the realm of possibilities, the realm of what the human body can do, what the human spirit can do. And it's about listening, it's about listening to remarkable music and how we respond to that."
8
"Even though a number of people have tried, no one has ever found a way to drink for a living."
8
"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."
8
"Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count."
8
"But mostly not for nothing never quite for nothing even stillest night when air too still for even the lightest leaf to sound no not to sound to carry too still for even the lightest leaf to carry the brief way here and not die the sound not die on the brief way the wave not die away."
8
"Few women care to be laughed at and men not at all, except for large sums of money."
8
"We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?"
8
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