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Quotes by Playwright
"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."
48
"All which is not prose is verse; and all which is not verse is prose."
48
"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."
48
"I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil."
48
"Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits."
48
"We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children."
47
"Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed."
47
"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!"
47
"Strength instead of being the lusty child of passion, grows by grappling with and subduing them."
47
"No yesterdays are ever wasted for those who give themselves to today."
47
"In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air."
47
"Each had defended his own country; the Germans Germany, the Frenchmen France; they had done their duty."
47
"There was a tacit understanding between them that 'liquor helped' growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief."
47
"The real menace in dealing with a five-year-old is that in no time at all you begin to sound like a five-year-old."
47
"The man who has everything figured out is probably a fool."
47
"We can only guess at the thoughts and emotions of our neighbors. Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself."
47
"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."
47
"A woman can be anything the man who loves her would have her be."
47
"Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible."
47
"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."
47
"I have often noticed that a bribe has that effect - it changes a relation. The man who offers a bribe gives away a little of his own importance; the bribe once accepted, he becomes the inferior, like a man who has paid for a woman."
47
"I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art."
47
"I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."
47
"Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to."
47
"Words are the clothes thoughts wear."
47
"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill."
47
"Here we are, we're alone in the universe, there's no God, it just seems that it all began by something as simple as sunlight striking on a piece of rock. And here we are. We've only got ourselves. Somehow, we've just got to make a go of it. We've only ourselves."
47
"The bulk of mankind have indeed, in all countries in their turn, been made the prey of ambition."
47
"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,
47
"The thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."
46
"A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself."
46
"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."
46
"A man sits in his car at the traffic lights, waiting for them to go green."
46
"Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way."
46
"And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy."
46
"ESTRAGON: Don't touch me! Don't question me! Don't speak to me! Stay with me!VLADIMIR: Did I ever leave you?ESTRAGON: You let me go."
46
"IBM has taken a leadership role in this area and is prepared to be a technology partner with companies around the world to take advantage of these new developments."
46
"There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life."
46
"Perfect reason flees all extremity, and leads one to be wise with sobriety."
46
"The target market is for people who have not been entrenched in Web culture."
46
"Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space."
46
"I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre."
46
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