Quotes by Playwrights - Page 14

I've had several years in Hollywood and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.
Wilson Mizner
He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.
Josephine Tey
Of all knowledge, the wise and good seek mostly to know themselves.
William Shakespeare
To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.
Oscar Wilde
It is not wise to be wiser than is necessary.
Philippe Quinault
For sensible men I prepare only three kraters: one for health (which they drink first), the second for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep. After the third one is drained, wise men go home. The fourth krater is not mine any more - it belongs to bad behaviour; the fifth is for shouting; the sixth is for rudeness and insults; the seventh is for fights; the eighth is for breaking the furniture; the ninth is for depression; the tenth is for madness and unconsciousness.
Eubulus
I say to life, "You are very hard", and I also say: "We are blind, we prefer to be blind. It is easier...". Life has to be hard to have any affect on us; even now we hardly notice it. Beyond that can one go? I must. I add, "We are also blind to the miracles of good that come to us. We hardly heed them, we even protest against them". Then I am left where I was, appalled by the hardness of life, knowing we are forced to be unwilling heroes. Suddenly I wonder--is all hardness justified because we are so slow in realizing that life was meant to be heroic? Greatness is required of us. That is life's aim and justification, and we poor fools have for centuries been trying to make it convenient, manageable, pliant to our will. It is also peaceful and tender and funny and dull. Yes, all that.
Florida Scott-Maxwell
I have outlasted all desire,My dreams and I have grown apart;My grief alone is left entire,The gleamings of an empty heart.The storms of ruthless dispensationHave struck my flowery garland numb,I live in lonely desolationAnd wonder when my end will come.Thus on a naked tree-limb, blastedBy tardy winter's whistling chill,A single leaf which has outlastedIts season will be trembling still.
Alexander Pushkin
The more we reduce the size of our world the more we shall be its master.
Jacinto Benavente
Help me Cassius or I sink!
William Shakespeare
Live by the words of intelligence endured..F@&$ IT!
William Shakespeare
Catch the life with the agility of a dog trying to get a hold of the flying Frisbee!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.
Thornton Wilder
A country which prefers guns to flowers will live the beauty of the flowers only in its graveyards!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But the trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Cormac McCarthy
Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion on the other hand produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
Jean Cocteau
You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?" "I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.
Oscar Wilde
You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!
Christy Hall
A seagull flying beautifully is heaven; a seagull hunting an innocent fish is hell! Existence is heaven and hell, joy and horror!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Nay, could their numbers countervail the stars,Or ever-drizzling drops of April showers,Or wither'd leaves that autumn shaketh down,Yet would the Soldan by his conquering powerSo scatter and consume them in his rage, That not a man should live to rue their fall.
Christopher Marlowe
If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart.
Oscar Wilde
Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.
Langston Hughes
That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. That was all.
Oscar Wilde
Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
Oscar Wilde
Once I heard Dantly tell Welton that the Native Americans used to call that particular part of the morning “between the wolf and the dog” because the sky is so deep blue and spooky or whatever that you can’t tell what’s what. Is that a wolf on that hill or a dog? A man or a monkey? A saint or the devil?
Adam Rapp
Man has not forgotten to be man because man has not yet learned to be man! You can’t forget the thing you haven’t learned yet!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Wisdom is the lamp of love, and love is the oil of the lamp. Love, sinking deeper, grows wiser; and wisdom that springs up aloft comes ever the nearer to love. Love is the food of wisdom; wisdom the food of love; a circle of light within which those who love, clasp the hands of those who are wise.
Maurice Maeterlinck
O, thou art fairer than the evening air     Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;     Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter     When he appear'd to hapless Semele;     More lovely than the monarch of the sky     In wanton Arethusa's azur'd armsExcerpt From: Christopher Marlowe. “The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn't wait, why didn't she wait for me?
Emma Donoghue
You didn't wake up, your dreams just changed gear.
Ben Elton
He had seen bigger men than he with mummy's handkerchief clutched in on hand and a bloody dagger in the other.
Eoin Colfer
No legacy is so rich as honesty.
William Shakespeare
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; or a breath of psychic pain; a sense of being spoken to from afar, from the sky or the sea; an agonizingly developed sense of hearing which can cause one to wince at the murmuring of unseen atoms; an irrational staring into the heart of some closed kingdom suddenly and briefly revealed.
Knut Hamsun
If you feel you have to open a particular door, open it, otherwise all your life that door will haunt your mind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
William Shakespeare
Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.
Mae West
Stew's so comforting on a rainy day.
Dodie Smith
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,And, constant stars, in them I read such art,As truth and beauty shall together thriveIf from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;Or else of thee I prognosticate,Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
William Shakespeare
The things that make me different are the things that make me ME. -Piglet
A.A. Milne
But in the cause of science men are expected to suffer.
Jules Verne
From this day to the ending of the world,But we in it shall be remembered-We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;For he to-day that sheds his blood with meShall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,This day shall gentle his condition;And gentlemen in England now-a-bedShall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaksThat fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
William Shakespeare
But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.
Betty Smith
Our laugh is a torment and our cry is a joy for the Satan!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs divorce fornication bullying travel meditation medication depression neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.
Joseph Heller
Harrogate saw them going along Blount Avenue Sunday morning. They wore outfits all cut from the same bolt of cloth and in the church pew standing six across they looked like a strip of gaudy wallpaper cut into those linked dolls madfolk pass their time in fashioning.
Cormac McCarthy
Hope like the gleaming taper's light adorns and cheers our way And still as darker grows the night emits a lighter ray.
Oliver Goldsmith
She is very clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay. White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire, and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences.
Oscar Wilde
Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
The ugliest of trades have their moments of pleasure. Now if I was a grave digger or even a hangman there are some people I could work for with a great deal of enjoyment.
Douglas Jerrold
Ghosts! […] I almost think we are all of us ghosts. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that ‘walks’ in us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, one and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.
Henrik Ibsen
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
Oscar Wilde
It's a grand thing to be able to take your money in your hand and to think no more of it when it slips away from you than you would a trout that would slip back into the stream.
Augusta Gregory
In the dark that followed - Lucy said; "where I was born, the trees were always in the sun. And I left that place because it was intolerant of rain. Now, we are here in a place where there are no trees and there is only rain. And I intend to leave this place - because it is intolerant of light. Somewhere - there must be somewhere where darkness and light are reconciled. So I am starting a rumour, here and now, of yet another world. I don't know when it will present itself - I don't know where it will be. But - as with all those other worlds now past when it is ready, I intend to go there.
Timothy Findley
Kazu, now that she thought of it, realized that for all her headstrong temperament, she had never loved a man younger than herself. A young man has such a surplus of spiritual and physical gifts that he is likely to be cocksure of himself, particularly when dealing with an older woman, and there is no telling how swelled up with self-importance he may become. Besides, Kazu felt a physical repugnance for youth. A woman is more keenly aware than a man of the shocking disharmony between a young man's spiritual and physical qualities, and Kazu had never met a young man who wore his youth well. She was moreover repelled by the sleekness of a young man's skin.
Yukio Mishima
Lady Caroline: As far as I can make out, the young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire. Mrs. Allonby: The one advantage of playing with fire, Lady Caroline, is that one never gets even singed. It is the people who don't know how to play with it who get burned up.
Oscar Wilde
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard Shaw
The sweetest honey is loathsome in its own deliciousness. And in the taste destroys the appetite. Therefore, love moderately.
William Shakespeare
But a far more virulent strain survived. It's having sex with your thoughts. You'll give birth to increasingly more monstrous ideas.
Grant Morrison
A cheerful music is a powerful light for the shadows of sorrow!
Mehmet Murat ildan