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Quotes by Playwright
"I was limply poking about in the garbage saying probably, for at that age I must still have been capable of general ideas, This is life."
32
"A conservative is a man who will not look at the new moon out of respect for that "ancient institution" the old one."
32
"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."
32
"Perfection has one grave defect: it is apt to be dull."
32
"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult."
32
"I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre."
32
"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."
32
"Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you."
32
"The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible."
32
"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."
32
"I must be happy, he said, it is less pleasant than I should have thought."
32
"Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense."
31
"You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return."
31
"I would have thought he would be there out of just plain curiosity. It was incredible that he was missing."
31
"My best chance is that, in a happy moment, I hit upon St Francis as the subject for a series of plays. Others might have written them better: but, as I have written them, the advantage will probably remain mine."
31
"I feel about airplanes the way I feel about diets. It seems to me that they are wonderful things for other people to go on."
31
"Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much."
31
"I wish I were one of those terribly clever people who, when they write their autobiographies, always say, when I was fifteen months old I distinctly remember my Aunt Fanny saying to me, etc."
31
"Have you shat, my child, I said gently."
31
"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."
31
"All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs."
31
"I was just then going through a healthy reaction from the orthodoxy of my youth; religion had become for me not so much a possession as an obsession, which I was trying to throw off, and this iconoclastic tale of an imaginary tribe was the result."
31
"I mean New York City is the financial capital of the world. It's where all the money passes through, the Dow Jones, whatever, that's where all the money goes."
31
"Being divorced is like being hit by a Mack truck. If you live through it, you start looking very carefully to the right and to the left."
30
"One of the local reporters assured me Garrison would put in an appearance for the cross-examination, but as the courtroom settled down and the rear doors were closed, there was no sign of him."
30
"Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves."
Men,
30
"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."
30
"I am at war... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise."
30
"POZZO:I am blind.(Silence.)ESTRAGON:Perhaps he can see into the future."
30
"The kind of people who always go on about whether a thing is in good taste invariably have very bad taste."
30
"There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle."
30
"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."
30
"Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count."
30
"And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity."
29
"He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness - the sense that is where we really belong."
29
"In London, love and scandal are considered the best sweeteners of tea."
29
"At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely."
29
"You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy."
29
"Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience."
29
"A friend who is near and dear may in time become as useless as a relative."
29
"There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime."
29
"The only sin is the sin of being born."
29
"He really is terribly heavy going. Like running up hill in roller skates."
29
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