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Quotes by Playwright
"Communists have committed great crimes but at least they have not stood aside like an established society and been indifferent. I would rather have blood on my hands than water like Pilate."
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"No man is so old as to believe he cannot live one more year."
11
"Champagne, if you are seeking the truth, is better than a lie detector. It encourages a man to be expansive, even reckless, while lie detectors are only a challenge to tell lies successfully."
11
"I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo."
11
"The defeat of the Americans in Canada and the advantages gained by the British arms in the Jerseys, and indeed for some months in every other quarter, gave to the royal cause an air of triumph."
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"You can never know enough about your characters."
11
"Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together."
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"From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything."
Time,
11
"If you greatly desire something, have the guts to stake everything on obtaining it."
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"Harmony is pure love, for love is complete agreement."
11
"One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her."
11
"As a boy I used to go to the Chamber of Horrors at the annual fair, to look at the wax figures of Emperors and Kings, of heroes and murderers of the day. The dead now had that same unreality, which shocks without arousing pity."
10
"I'll go through life either first class or third, but never in second."
10
"The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency."
10
"It is not time for mirth and laughter, the cold, gray dawn of the morning after."
10
"Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out."
10
"The life of a dancer is tragically short. What is remarkable about the New York City Ballet is that it makes us forget that. Because it keeps the ballet alive."
10
"For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded."
10
"Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock."
10
"Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place."
10
"For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!"
10
"Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense."
10
"It's my rule never to lose me temper till it would be detrimental to keep it."
10
"Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip."
10
"With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy."
10
"It's insulting to ask a dramatist what his view of his play is. I have no opinion."
10
"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life."
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"Between speeches and awards, you can find something to do every other week. It's hard to write. Your focus gets splintered. Once you put one thing in your calendar, that month is gone."
10
"The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility."
10
"Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience."
10
"Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth."
10
"As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature."
10
"But it has also enabled me to find my feet as a lecturer and a reader of my own plays to audiences who like to hear them; and that experience of immediate appreciation gives greater pleasure and more stimulus towards further activity than even the most laudatory of reviews."
10
"Nathan Lane always wanted to play Oscar. When he came in the first day, he already knew his lines. He said he'd known them since he was 18."
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"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
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"It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit."
10
"I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere."
10
"It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales!"
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