Quotes by Playwrights - Page 110

When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun.
Hans Johst
You will get closer to the truths only when you start thinking this way: My religion is not the best religion, my country is not the best country, my culture is not the best culture, and my life is not the best life! The more you move away from arrogance, pride and prejudice, the more you will get closer to the truth!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Your culture is your limit; if you can’t go beyond it, you will remain as a frog of your little lake!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.
Sinclair Lewis
To be or not to be that is the question.
William Shakespeare
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
Edward Albee
We always find something, eh Didi, to let us think we exist?
Samuel Beckett
The enemy is within, and within stays within, and we can’t get out of within.
Arthur Miller
...some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not.
W Somerset Maugham
Going to see plays isn't what you people should do. Try looking at yourselves a little more often and see what gray lives you all lead. How much of what you say is unnecessary.
Anton Chekhov
Toadstool mandarins are a form of toxic jellyfish whose tentacles are loaded with entheogenic venom. The effects of a mandarin sting are threefold. The first is a sharp stinging sensation; the second a nasty red welt, which may fester if not treated with a salve of toadstool mandarin doodoo. And the third is a bold of self-awareness, thanks to the entheogens in the venom. Having been stung, a victim's typical reaction will be something like:Owww. Zark, that hurts.Then:Oh no. Look at this nasty red welt. I'm in the swimsuit competition later.And finally:What? I'm a latent misogynist with father issues!If a person is allergic to mandarin venom, one sting will prompt total self-awareness, leading to either immediate catatonia or a career as a talk show pundit.
Eoin Colfer
No human being can be so honest as to become completely false.
Yukio Mishima
In his moments of pride he had said all those things, half in fun and half in earnest, and he began to wonder how he could have been so many kinds of a fool for so long without realising it.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Master Chekhov says Man is what he believes. From here we conclude that when Man believes in a crap, Man becomes a crap!
Mehmet Murat ildan
People always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.
Cormac McCarthy
The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard Shaw
There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
Irvine Welsh
As for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
Oscar Wilde
Forgetting: that, too, was the heart's slow way of healing, but it could only be done alone. Love and loss turns us into the most solitary of creatures, their mysteries can never entirely be shared.
Eric Gamalinda
Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here Where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog And little mouse, every unworthy thing, Live here in heaven and may look on her, But Romeo may not.
William Shakespeare
April 43rd 2000Today is the day of great triumph. There is a king of Spain. He has been found at last. That king is me. I only discovered this today. Frankly, it all came to me in a flash.
Nikolai Gogol
But we know that we are no longer the same, and not only know that we are no longer the same, but know in what we are no longer the same, you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not wiser, for wiser I could hardly become without grave personal inconvenience, whereas sorrow is a thing you can keep on adding to all your life long, is it not, like a stamp or egg collection
Samuel Beckett
Well, I've got an idea," said Rabbit, "and here it is. We take Tigger for a long explore, somewhere where he's never been, and we lose him there, and next morning we find him again, and--mark my words--he'll be a different Tigger altogether." "Why?" said Pooh. "Because he'll be a Humble Tigger. Because he'll be a Sad Tigger, a Melancholy Tigger, a Small and Sorry Tigger, an Oh-Rabbit-I-am-glad-to-see-you Tigger. That's why." "Will he be glad to see me and Piglet, too?" "Of course." "That's good," said Pooh. "I should hate him to go on being Sad," said Piglet doubtfully. "Tiggers never go on being Sad," explained Rabbit.
A.A. Milne
Sometimes a gloomy street is all a sad person needs! A magical relief may arise from the meeting of the two sad things!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I'm losing weight, you notice, Pop?
Arthur Miller
Even the giant lead balls are not as heavy as the two sad eyes!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A sad tale's best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins.
William Shakespeare
And to the little Squirrel who lived in the fir-tree, and was lonely, he said, 'Where is my mother?' And the Squirrel answered, 'Thou hast slain mine. Dost thou seek to slay thine also?
Oscar Wilde
It is sad to love and be unloved, but sadder still to be unable to love.
Maurice Maeterlinck
There is no worse sorrow than remembering happiness in the day of sorrow.
Alfred de Musset
Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.
Cormac McCarthy
Sadness flies on the wings of the morning, and out of the heart of darkness comes the light.
Jean Giraudoux
And you find some way to surviveAnd you find out you don't have to be happy at all..To be happy you're alive.
Brian Yorkey
It were a grief so brief to part with thee.Farewell.
William Shakespeare
If an obstacle in the real world can be eliminated in the mind then it can no longer resist to exist in the real world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Fie, fie upon her! There's language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.
William Shakespeare
Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
...that it is not the literal past, the 'facts' of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language.
Brian Friel
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...
George Bernard Shaw
A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...
George Bernard Shaw
Sunday, the day for the language of leisure.
Elfriede Jelinek
Language most shews a man: Speak, that I may see thee.
Ben Jonson
Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I take the words I can get and try to occupy them. Using the idea that my grandfather gave me — “If you say a word often enough it becomes you” — I borrow people for a moment, by borrowing their words. I borrow them for a moment to understand something about them, and to understand something about us. By “us,” I mean humans.
Anne Deavere Smith
Speaking calls for risk, speaking calls for a sense of what one has to lose. Not just what one has to gain.
Anne Deavere Smith
Yet from time to time we are betrayed by language, if not in the words themselves, in the rhythm with which we deliver our words. Over time, I would learn to listen for those wonderful moments when people spoke a kind of personal music, which left a rhythmic architecture of who they were. I would be much more interested in those rhythmic architectures than in the information they might or might not reveal.
Anne Deavere Smith
Some people use language as a mask. And some want to create designed language that appears to reveal them but does not.
Anne Deavere Smith
I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.
George Bernard Shaw
The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.
Anton Chekhov
The creation of language is the creation of a fiction. The minute we speak we are in that fiction. It’s a fiction designed, we hope, to reveal a truth. There is no “pure” language. The only “pure language” is the initial sounds of a baby. All of us lose that purity, and as we get more “of” the world, we even lose sometimes the capacity to keep that breath moving in our language.
Anne Deavere Smith
We can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment that they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It’s the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it’s a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They’re digging deep and projecting out at the same time. […] The idea is that the psychology of people is going to live right inside those moments when their grammar falls apart and, like being in a shipwreck, they are on their own to make it all work out.
Anne Deavere Smith
Fuck words, nothing spokencomprehends the defiantly ephemeral.I take my incompleteness with the rest, an exilein any language.
Eric Gamalinda
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.
Langston Hughes
The world can move or not by changing some words.
Aaron Sorkin
He said it twice because he had never said it before, and it sounded funny.
A.A. Milne
One picture is worth a thousand words. Yes, but only if you look at the picture and say or think the thousand words
William Saroyan
I dug her usage of "Spotify" as a verb.
Kara Lee Corthron
When somebody speaks a language that we don’t know, we often imagine that some important things are being said!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I think we can learn a lot about a person in the very moment that language fails them. In the very moment they they have to be more creative than they would have imagined in order to communicate. It's the very moment that they have to dig deeper than the surface to find words, and at the same time, it's a moment when they want to communicate very badly. They're digging deep and projecting out at the same time.
Anna Deavere Smith