Quotes by Playwrights - Page 101

Never put off writing until you are better at it.
Gary Henderson
And oh, heaven - the crowded playhouse, the stench of perfume upon heated bodies, the silly laughter and the clatter, the party in the Royal box - the King himself present - the impatient crowd in the cheap seats stamping and shouting for the play to begin while they threw orange peel on to the stage.
Daphne du Maurier
There is no such thing as a world without combat, no civilization which doesn't start off by laying down the rules for relations between people. But the rules are there for the weak. The strong man experiments to find out how far they can be stretched, he creates his own rules. You would like everything to be based on the goodwill and charity of one's fellow men. But if there is no private profit to be made, there will be no progress.
Henning Mankell
The future is only the past again, entered through another gate.
Arthur Wing Pinero
That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales...
Tony Kushner
In five hundred years' time, to the historian writing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, this little episode would not exist. There will be plenty of other causes. You and me and poor Jones will not even figure in a footnote. It will be all economics, politics, battles.
Graham Greene
Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
Oscar Wilde
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues. Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous: if he finds pleasure in helping others he is benevolent; if he finds pleasure in working for society he is public-spirited; but it is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.
W Somerset Maugham
The greatness of the enterprise does not always ensure success, but at least ensures glory.
Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Rain touching our hand becomes a little bit salty! Man touching wisdom becomes a little bit wiser! More touches take more from the touched!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Your pain and anger will pass, but the guilt would remain with you for always.
Dodie Smith
Let the world know your dreams, my friend; realise them!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Read, so as to know; speak, so as to teach; write, so as to think!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Alas, my lord, your wisdom is consumed in confidence.
William Shakespeare
See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.
Rebecca Wells
Nowadays 'invisibility' was supposed to be the big problem, but the way I saw it was, all that mattered was to be visible to yourself.
Emma Donoghue
Cause sometimes it's hard to let the future begin!
Lorraine Hansberry
Man is many things, but he is not rational.
Oscar Wilde
Death must die so that life can be real!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.
Morris West
...the Conservative party found him an embarrassment because he was apt to criticize the party leader in public, the Liberals naturally wanted to defeat him, and the newspapers were out to get him. It was a dreadful campaign on his part, for he lost his head, bullied his electors when he should have wooed them, and got into a wrangle with a large newspaper, which he threatened to sue for libel. He was defeated on election day so decisively that it was obviously a personal rather than a political rejection.
Robertson Davies
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
William Saroyan
There's a point at which when I start to know a man well--this isn't true of women--I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.
Kathy Acker
Be quiet! Anyone can spit in my face, and call me a criminal and a prostitute. But no one has the right to judge my remorse.
Jean-Paul Sartre
drowning in a sea of logicthis monstrous state of palsy
Sarah Kane
People run away to be alone,' he said. Some people had to be alone.
William Trevor
Benedick: I protest I love thee.Beatrice: Why, then, God forgive me!Benedick: What offence, sweet Beatrice?Beatrice: You have stayed me in a happy hour: I was about toprotest I loved you.Benedick: And do it with all thy heart.Beatrice: I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.
William Shakespeare
The door', replied Maimie, 'will always, always be open, and mother will always be waiting at it for me.
J.M. Barrie
A cat may look at a king.
John Heywood
I am a Jew: Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands organs dimensions senses affections passions? fed with die same food hurt with the same weapons subject to the same diseases healed by the same means warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
William Shakespeare
Laughter's all the damned thing's fit for.
Henrik Ibsen
That time of year thou mayst in me beholdWhen yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hangUpon those boughs which shake against the cold,Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.In me thou seest the twilight of such dayAs after sunset fadeth in the west,Which by and by black night doth take away,Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.In me thou see'st the glowing of such fireThat on the ashes of his youth doth lie,As the death-bed whereon it must expireConsumed with that which it was nourish'd by.This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
William Shakespeare
Every new time will give its law.
Maxim Gorky
Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.
Oscar Wilde
In the jungle of ideas, it is hard to find the true direction! The paths of the wrong ideas often seem to be very alluring!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Anyway, if you need your heroes to be perfect, you won't have very many. Even Superman had his Kryptonite. I'd rather have my heroes be more like me: trying to do the right thing, sometimes messing up. Making mistakes. Saying you're sorry. And forgiving other people when they mess up, too.
Madeleine George
To seek one's goals and to drive toward it steeling one's heart is most uplifting!
Henrik Ibsen
If you wish success in life, make perseverance you bosom friend, experience your wise councellor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius.
Joseph Addison
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.
Oscar Wilde
Not yet do you feel it. Wait for the future.
Euripides
He is not rich that possesses much but he that covets no more and he is not poor that enjoys little but he that wants too much.
Francis Beaumont
What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream
Cormac McCarthy
The guts carry the feet not the feet the guts.
Miguel de Cervantes
Even the most perfect advice cannot be as useful as a staircase or a rope for those who live in the dark wells!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty, beyond waht can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found; a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; beyond all manner of so much I love you.
William Shakespeare
Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.
Graham Greene
The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you would create something,you must be something.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
He stopped the flyersAnd by his rare example made the cowardTurn terror into sport. As weeds beforeA vessel under sail, so men obeyedAnd fell below his stem. His sword, Death's stamp,Where it did mark, it took; from face to footHe was a thing of blood, whose every motionWas timed with dying cries. Alone he enteredThe mortal gate o' th' city, which he paintedWith shunless destiny; aidless came offAnd with a sudden reinforcement struckCorioles like a planet. Now all's his,When by and by the dim of war gan pierceHis ready sense; then straight his doubled spiritRequickened what in flesh was fatigate,And to the battle came he, where he didRun reeking o'er the lives of men as if'Twere a perpetual spoil; and till we calledBoth field and city ours, he never stoodTo ease his breast with panting.
William Shakespeare
Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quickly you hardly catch it going.
Tennessee Williams
A sense of the value of time ... is an essential preliminary to efficient work it is the only method of avoiding hurry.
Arnold Bennett
Marriage is the ultimate solitude with minimal privacy.
Nelson Rodrigues
A man can take only so much. Even a phony man like me.
Jeff Lindsay
A soul that is kind and intends justice discovers more than any sophist
Sophocles
We can't stop reading. Compulsively we find ourselves reading significance into dreams (we construct a science upon it); into tea-leaves and the fall of cards. We look up at the shifting vapours in the sky, and see faces, lost cities, defeated armies. Isolated in the dark, with nothing to hear and no surfaces to touch, we hallucinate reading-matter. Our craving becomes generalized – for 'the meaning of life'. If we lived alone in a featureless desert we should learn to place the individual grains of sand in a moral or aesthetic hierarchy. We should long to find the greatest grain of sand in the world, and even (in order to find a fixed point of orientation in time as well as in space) the all-time greatest grain of sand; the grain of sand whose discovery changed our whole understanding of grains of sand for ever.
Michael Frayn
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,And that is the name that you never will guess;The name that no human research can discover--But the cat himself knows, and will never confess.When you notice a cat in profound meditation,The reason, I tell you, is always the same:His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplationOf the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:His ineffable effableEffanineffableDeep and inscrutable singular Name.
T.S Eliot
Every time we see a child we travel back to the times we have forgotten and we bitterly visit all the beautiful things taken from us in the name of being an adult!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To sleep! perchance to dream ay there's the rub For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause.
William Shakespeare
I know that in the end you'll overwhelm me, but I'll still fight you as long as there's a breath in my body... Yes, you've robbed me of everything: the laurels of glory, the roses of love! But there's one thing you can't take away from me. When I go to meet God this evening, and doff my hat before the lofty gates, my salute will sweep the blue threshold of heaven, because I'll still have one thing intact, without a stain, something that I'll take with me in spite of you: My white plume.
Edmond Rostand
There is much to be said in favor of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch of the ignorance of the community. By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. By invariably discussing the unnecessary, it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.
Oscar Wilde