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Quotes by Playwright
"I think isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity."
45
"There is no praise to bear the sort that you put in your pocket."
45
"Until the day of his death, no man can be sure of his courage."
45
"He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
45
"She gathered herself together. No one could describe the scorn of her expression or the contemptuous hatred she put into her answer. "You men! You filthy dirty pigs! You're all the same, all of you. Pigs! Pigs!"
45
"It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses."
45
"Freedom, I thought, comes only to the successful."
45
"I think that every year that the New York City Ballet is alive is worthy of celebration. Because otherwise the terrible thing is just that we take it for granted."
45
"For men, as a rule, love is but an episode which takes place among the other affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and they are not the very interesting ones; even women, with whom the subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them."
45
"I love criticism just so long as it's unqualified praise."
45
"One can be very much in love with a woman without wishing to spend the rest of one's life with her."
45
"Prithee don't screw your wit beyond the compass of good manners."
44
"When you say you are in love with humanity, you are well satisfied with yourself."
44
"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."
44
"Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget."
44
"It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base."
44
"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."
44
"The whole point of a sacrifice is that you give up something you never really wanted in the first place. People are doing it around you all the time. They give up their careers, say - or their beliefs - or sex."
44
"A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in."
44
"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."
44
"To seduce a woman famous for strict morals, religious fervor and the happiness of her marriage: what could possibly be more prestigious?"
44
"As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature."
44
"In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream."
44
"He who follows his lessons tastes a profound peace, and looks upon everybody as a bunch of manure."
44
"It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world's wrong the greatest of all."
44
"I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character."
44
"One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience."
44
"Success took me to her bosom like a maternal boa constrictor."
44
"Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else."
44
"It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection."
44
"An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity."
44
"Fortune's a right whore. If she give ought, she deals it in small parcels, that she may take away all at one swoop."
44
"The man who bears my name, and who claims to be me, was born on July 15, 1865, the sixth in a family of seven. He was an ugly child, and remained ugly till his eighteenth year, when his looks gradually improved."
44
"The most useful thing about a principle is that it can always be sacrificed to expediency."
44
"I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.(Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.)Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited."
44
"Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it."
44
"At the turn of the century theatre does not have to be prescriptive."
44
"In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old."
44
"I have the fault of being a little more sincere than is proper."
44
"I want to look at life - at the commonplaces of existence - as if we had just turned a corner and run into it for the first time."
44
"Nevertheless, the mode, the justification, and all the games involved in this war were dishonest."
44
"My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization."
44
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