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Quotes by Playwright
"Curiosity is the hair of our habit tending to stand on end. It rarely happens that our attention is not stained in greater or lesser degree by this animal element."
8
"And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself."
8
"Suicide is possible, but not probable; hanging, I trust, is even more unlikely; for I hope that, by the time I die, my countrymen will have become civilised enough to abolish capital punishment."
8
"I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all."
8
"In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths."
7
"Oh,' the priest said, 'that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."
7
"The worst thing about this war is the chance it gives these dreadful little persons, the chance to make themselves important."
7
"Some people have such a talent for making the best of a bad situation that they go around creating bad situations so they can make the best of them."
7
"If you don't change your beliefs, your life will be like this forever. Is that good news?"
7
"Anyone can tell the truth, but only very few of us can make epigrams."
7
"How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life."
7
"When he asked me, with obvious self-satisfaction, what I thought of the scenario, I hardly knew how to answer. I asked if he had seen the play and was hardly surprised when he said no."
7
"Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it, but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it. A swollen udder is very uncomfortable."
7
"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."
7
"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."
7
"In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment."
7
"And it is always Easter Sunday at the New York City Ballet. It is always coming back to life. Not even coming back to life - it lives in the constant present."
7
"One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter."
7
"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it."
7
"Our homeland is the whole world. Our law is liberty. We have but one thought, revolution in our hearts."
7
"CLOV:Do you believe in the life to come?HAMM:Mine was always that."
7
"All the New York City Ballet does is hit beautiful home runs."
7
"I write plays for people who wouldn't be seen dead in the theatre."
7
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
7
"She was willing a little bit of sweated labour, incapable of betraying the slogan of her slavers, that since the customer or sucker was paying for his gutrot ten times what it cost to produce and five times what it cost to fling in his face, it was only reasonable to defer to his complaints up to but not exceeding fifty per cent of his exploitation."
7
"She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate."
7
"Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well."
6
"The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh."
6
"There he is then, the unfortunate brute, quite miserable because of me, for whom there is nothing to be done, and he so anxious to help, so used to giving orders and to being obeyed. There he is, ever since I came into the world, possibly at his instigation, I wouldn't put it past him, commanding me to be well, you know, in every way, no complaints at all, with as much success as if he were shouting at a lump of inanimate matter."
6
"It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you for it was the illusion they loved."
6
"The silence was enchanting. Infinite space seemed to enter it, and my spirit, alone with the stars, seemed capable of any adventure."
6
"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."
6
"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."
6
"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge."
6
"Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don't there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little."
6
"When a man's mind rides faster than his horse can gallop they quickly both tire."
6
"Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer because of it that increases."
Love,
6
"I write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning."
6
"But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck."
6
"Personally of course I regret everything.Not a word, not a deed, not a thought, not a need,not a grief, not a joy, not a girl, not a boy,not a doubt, not a trust, not a scorn, not a lust,not a hope, not a fear, not a smile, not a tear,not a name, not a face, no time, no place...that I do not regret, exceedingly.An ordure, from beginning to end."
6
"Nothing matters but the writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile... a stain upon the silence."
6
“You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the—appalling—strangeness of the mercy of God.”
6
"In the first place it's not true that people improve as you know them better: they don't. That's why one should only have acquaintances and never make friends. An acquaintance shows you only the best of himself, he's considerate and polite, he conceals his defects behind a mask of social convention; but we grow so intimate with him that he throws the mask aside, get to know him so well that he doesn't trouble any longer to pretend; then you'll discover a being of such meanness, of such trivial nature, of such weakness, of such corruption, that you'd be aghast if you didn't realize that that was his nature and it was just as stupid to condemn him as to condemn the wolf because he ravens or the cobra because he strikes."
6
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