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Quotes by Playwright
"Nothing's so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy."
18
"All evil comes from the old.They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them."
18
"Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to."
18
"If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit."
18
"If you're going to make a musical, don't cartoon it from the play. Make it better than the play. Have a reason for making it sing."
18
"A lawyer is never entirely comfortable with a friendly divorce, anymore than a good mortician wants to finish his job and then have the patient sit up on the table."
18
"He wants to live on through something-and in his case, his masterpiece is his son. all of us want that, and it gets more poignant as we get more anonymous in this world."
18
"The bulk of mankind have indeed, in all countries in their turn, been made the prey of ambition."
18
"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?"
18
"Oh, love is real enough; you will find it someday, but it has one archenemy - and that is life."
18
"I know My God commands, whose power no power resists."
18
"The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it."
17
"Talent is like a faucet, while it is open, one must write."
17
"Modesty is a quality in a lover more praised by the women than liked."
17
"The study of the human character opens at once a beautiful and a deformed picture of the soul."
17
"It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest."
17
"At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one's lost self."
17
"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."
17
"I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know."
17
"I do not want to have the feeling of writing "for eternity," so to speak."
17
"If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women."
17
"On that other novels followed: but I still wrote fairy tales and dreamy poems of another world."
17
"Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to make the world a better place."
17
"Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!"
17
"If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet."
17
"To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief."
17
"Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action."
17
"We learn resignation not by our own suffering, but by the suffering of others."
17
"We never understand how little we need in this world until we know the loss of it."
17
"In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air."
17
"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."
17
"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."
17
"We poison our lives with fear of burglary and shipwreck, and, ask anyone, the house is never burgled, and the ship never goes down."
17
"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."
17
"There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature."
17
"The more I do in my life, the more I can write music about new experiences."
17
"The law is not a "light" for you or any man to see by; the law is not an instrument of any kind. The law is a causeway upon which so long as he keeps to it a citizen may walk safely."
17
"There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life."
17
"You can't just go in there and open your mouth until the cast and director feel comfortable with you."
Open,
17
"If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting."
17
"The most useless are those who never change through the years."
17
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