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Quotes by Playwright
"The lines marking a penalty area are a disgrace to the playing fields of a public school."
12
"It's true Heaven forbids some pleasures, but a compromise can usually be found."
12
"Wealth often takes away chances from men as well as poverty. There is none to tell the rich to go on striving, for a rich man makes the law that hallows and hollows his own life."
12
"In tragedy every moment is eternity; in comedy, eternity is a moment."
12
"I don't believe in astrology. The only stars I can blame for my failures are those that walk about the stage."
12
"The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another."
Goal,
12
"Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award."
12
"I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing."
12
"It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word."
Word,
12
"In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air."
12
"The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."
12
"It's a terrific... you can't put it down. So I phoned him back and I said I'd love to do it. I went over to Paris for a meeting, and we just talked very generally about the approach."
12
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
12
"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."
12
"There are still a lot of cases in the world where you order something and then you see 'Delivery will be in 8-12 weeks.' This is because of the faxes and forms that still exist."
12
"I think of the New York City Ballet as the Yankees without George Steinbrenner."
12
"Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."
12
"A child's spirit is like a child, you can never catch it by running after it; you must stand still, and, for love, it will soon itself come back."
12
"Beauty is one of the rare things which does not lead to doubt of God."
12
"Comedy is an escape, not from truth but from despair; a narrow escape into faith."
12
"Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume."
12
"You know it is not my interest to pay the principal, or my principal to pay the interest."
12
"Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil - or else an absolute ignorance."
12
"Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage."
12
"He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
12
"One ought to look a good deal at oneself before thinking of condemning others."
12
"The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability."
12
"If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit."
12
"The bulk of mankind have indeed, in all countries in their turn, been made the prey of ambition."
12
"If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?"
12
"All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose."
12
"What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating."
12
"The last words he said to me when I bade him good-night were:Tell Amy it's no good coming after me. Anyhow, I shall change my hotel, so she wouldn't be able to find me.'My own impression is that she's well rid of you,' I said.My dear fellow, I only hope you'll be able to make her see it. But women are very unintelligent."
12
"The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it."
11
"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime."
11
"Plays are so much more special if they've never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production."
11
"Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
11
"After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?"
11
"Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead."
11
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