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Quotes by Playwright
"I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me."
16
"Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance."
16
"A man is already halfway in love with any woman who listens to him."
16
"He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid."
16
"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."
16
"Fortune's a right whore. If she give ought, she deals it in small parcels, that she may take away all at one swoop."
16
"If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that."
16
"As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing."
16
"People of quality know everything without ever having learned anything."
16
"Minds are like flowers. If you let it sit there without soaking anything up, it will dry up."
16
"What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all."
16
"Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author."
16
"Love's like the measles, all the worse when it comes late in life."
16
"I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do."
16
"The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
16
"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."
16
"General Washington had rather incautiously encamped the bulk of his army on Long Island - a large and plentiful district about two miles from the city of New York."
16
"The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry."
16
"The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi."
16
"There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket."
16
"For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom."
16
"Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast."
16
"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."
16
"He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
16
"Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it."
16
"Disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible."
16
"Mrs. MacAndrew shared the common opinion of her sex that a man is always a brute to leave a woman who is attached to him, but that a woman is much to blame if he does."
16
"I had seen the flowers on her dress beside the canals in the north, she was indigenous like a herb, and I never wanted to go home."
16
"Before this address to my countrymen is closed, I beg leave to observe, that as a new century has dawned upon us, the mind is naturally led ot contemplate the great events that have run parallel with and have just closed the last."
16
"You can never know enough about your characters."
16
"Do unto yourself as your neighbors do unto themselves and look pleasant."
16
"My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London."
15
"The love of domination and an uncontrolled lust of arbitrary power have prevailed among all nations and perhaps in proportion to the degrees of civilization."
15
"Envy, like the worm, never runs but to the fairest fruit; like a cunning bloodhound, it singles out the fattest deer in the flock."
15
"There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so."
15
"It never became an act in the sense of an act. It was always, no matter where we worked, little revues."
15
"Laughter can bring a new perspective."
15
"I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence."
15
"So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale."
15
"Death's a debt; his mandamus binds all alike- no bail, no demurrer."
15
"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!"
15
"First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people."
15
"Strength instead of being the lusty child of passion, grows by grappling with and subduing them."
15
"Though men determine, the gods doo dispose: and oft times many things fall out betweene the cup and the lip."
15
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