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Quotes by Playwright
"Tolerance is another word for indifference."
17
"Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny."
17
"Suffering is not increased by numbers. One body can contain all the suffering the world can feel."
17
"'Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion."
17
"To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin."
17
"It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy."
17
"At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive."
17
"I've got no mother, no wife, no kids. I had, but my mother's dead, and I lost my wife and my kids when I had my trouble. Women are bitches. It's hard for a chap to live without any affection in his life."
17
"I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time."
17
"Religion enabled society to organise itself to debate goodness, just as Greek drama had once done."
17
"Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life."
17
"I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, really in suburbia, so my mother was in community theatre plays."
17
"I couldn't help wondering, is my husband so unattractive that no woman has ever wanted him? Except me, of course. I must have wanted him, in a way, once, but I've forgotten why, and I was too young to know what I was choosing."
17
"Old age saves us from the realization of a great many fears."
17
"But when I came back into the city for the first time last November, I thought every truck, every building was going to blow up. It has truly changed me something fierce."
17
"Soldiers and peasants lived together on friendly terms; they knew each other and their everyday routines, and trusted each other; they shook their heads together over the war."
16
"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime."
16
"I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg."
16
"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?"
16
"Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead."
16
"Noble bold is an accident of fortune; noble actions characterize the great."
16
"Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy."
16
"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,
16
"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."
16
"There's no such thing as failure - just waiting for success."
16
"I submit all my plays to the National Theatre for rejection. To assure myself I am seeing clearly."
16
"Nothing is improbable until it moves into past tense."
16
"Some men like to make a little garden out of life and walk down a path."
16
"What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn't you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed."
16
"At a dinner party one should eat wisely but not too well, and talk well but not too wisely."
16
"God is on everyone's side... and in the last analysis, he is on the side with plenty of money and large armies."
16
"We had a certain kind of really big prestige among, I suppose not just intellectual folk, but a sort of nice middle class intelligent folk of a very urban nature."
16
"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."
16
"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."
16
"Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment."
16
"But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own."
16
"Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
16
"If you accept your limitations you go beyond them."
16
"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."
16
"Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day."
16
"Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time."
16
"The British were indeed very far superior to the Americans in every respect necessary to military operations, except the revivified courage and resolution, the result of sudden success after despair."
16
"I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me."
16
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