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Quotes by Playwright
"Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead."
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"Have you noticed that life, with murders and catastrophes and fabulous inheritances, happens almost exclusively in newspapers?"
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"There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success."
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"I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly."
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"First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people."
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"Strength instead of being the lusty child of passion, grows by grappling with and subduing them."
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"Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget."
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"The human voice sounds thicker with a chorus and reverb than a dry signal."
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"Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way."
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"A politician is the devil's quilted anvil; He fashions all sins on him, and the blows are never heard."
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"You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow."
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"He's very concealed, Polanski. We became very close friends, but I don't think I ever saw him drop his guard. I didn't see him upset or anything like that, we just did the work."
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"They look so expectant, and then they look so depressed... that was the other great lesson that The Royal Hunt of the Sun taught me, it was the profundity that masked drama can achieve, that of course, the audience were not seeing masks moving at all."
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"There is no greater glory than love, nor any great punishment than jealously."
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"Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword."
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"Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day."
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"Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather."
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"I have always paid income tax. I object only when it reaches a stage when I am threatened with having nothing left for my old age - which is due to start next Tuesday or Wednesday."
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"Dreaming of a tomorrow, which tomorrow, will be as distant then as 'tis today."
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"It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in."
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"Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books same reviews."
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"You can't just go in there and open your mouth until the cast and director feel comfortable with you."
Open,
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"We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it."
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"Faith without works is like a bird without wings; though she may hop with her companions on earth, yet she will never fly with them to heaven."
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"In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play."
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"With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil."
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"A murderer is regarded by the conventional world as something almost monstrous, but a murderer to himself is only an ordinary man. It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous."
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"The best thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost in look as much like home as we can."
Home,
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"That strange feeling we had in the war. Have you found anything in your lives since to equal it in strength? A sort of splendid carelessness it was, holding us together."
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"A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United STates was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia."
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"We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries."
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"My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!"
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"To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death."
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"The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry."
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"It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy."
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"There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket."
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"He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her."
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"For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom."
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"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it."
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