Quotes by Playwrights - Page 115

The fluid boundary between individuals and types is a true concern of the real writer.
Elias Canetti
Great writers speak with their works not with their mouths!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.
Gertrude Stein
As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.
Alan Ayckbourn
You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party
William Saroyan
I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion. Dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice--they all make fine fuel.
Edna Ferber
For writers it is always said that the first twenty years of life contain the whole of experience – the rest is observation
Graham Greene
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
William Saroyan
Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.
Lillian Hellman
Well, you know when people are no good at anything else they become writers.
W Somerset Maugham
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
Edward Albee
I do not know what makes a writer, but it probably isn't happiness.
William Saroyan
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.
Oscar Wilde
I knew, of course, that I should be well paid for my services, but I would gladly have accepted half the sum I expected if I could have had it that night, for our little treasury was wholly exhausted, and we had not sixpence to purchase a breakfast for the following day. When the great hall door shut upon me, and I found myself on the pavement, with all the luxury and splendour on one side, and I and my desolation on the other, the contrast struck me cruelly, for I too, had been rich, and dwelt in illuminated palaces, and had a train of liveried servants at my command, and sweet music had echoed through my halls. I felt desperate, and drawing my hat over my eyes I began pacing the square, forming wild plans for the relief or escape from my misery. ("The Italian's Story")
Catherine Crowe
The presence of even a single poor child on the street means a million defeats for mankind.
Mehmet Murat ildan
When it comes to poverty, there is no need to say anything. All we need to do is to help, the moment we encounter it.
Mehmet Murat ildan
For a man who is in poverty, doomsday is already there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A big hole in a poor child’s shoe is the simplest evidence to condemn the society he lives in.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Poverty is a mathematical proof of the fact that mankind is a big failure!
Mehmet Murat ildan
World, they have taken the small children like butterflies and thrown them, beating their wings, into the fire--
Nelly Sachs
Poverty must be eliminated or else the honour of humanity will vanish!
Mehmet Murat ildan
HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.
George Bernard Shaw
It is true that prosperity has many close friends; poverty, on the other hand, has only distant watchers!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Each new mornNew widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrowsStrike heaven on the face, that it resoundsAs if it felt with Scotland, and yelled outLike syllable of dolor.
William Shakespeare
Every one of us see many nightmares every day, not in our sleeps but with our very own eyes: The poverty! The most real and the most common nightmare of all times!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The day you forget about the poors, you become the poorest of the poor!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We live in the richest country in the world. There's plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle - the freedom, equality and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars- and hundreds of thousands of people who don't get to eat.
Carson McCullers
A thousand pounds for clothes--when on thinks how long poor people could live on it! When one thinks how long we could live on it, for that matter!
Dodie Smith
Sometimes when you had nothing at all and it was raining and you were alone in the flat, it was wonderful to know that you could have something even though it was only a cup of black and bitter coffee.
Betty Smith
Because of poverty and ignorance, not everyman living on earth lives in the same epoch!
Mehmet Murat ildan
And the child—your child—was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.
Stefan Zweig
It is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg.
Oscar Wilde
You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy, but till you feed us right and wrong can wait. Or is it only those who have the money who can enter the land of milk and honey?
Bertolt Brecht
Natural disasters happen from time to time but poverty happens all the time and therefore poverty is the greatest tragedy, it is the greatest disaster of mankind!
Mehmet Murat ildan
There is nothing so degrading as the constant anxiety about one's means of livelihood. I have nothing but contempt for the people who despise money. They are hypocrites or fools. Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off. The only thing to be careful about is that you do not pay more than a shilling for the shilling you earn. You will hear people say that poverty is the best spur to the artist. They have never felt the iron of it in their flesh. They do not know how mean it makes you. It exposes you to endless humiliation, it cuts your wings, it eats into your soul like a cancer. It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank, and independent. I pity with all my heart the artist, whether he writes or paints, who is entirely dependent for subsistence upon his art.
W Somerset Maugham
Poverty is apt to strike suddenly like influenza, it is well to have a few memories of extravagance in store for bad times.
Graham Greene
Mostly the greedy rich is responsible for the poor’s poverty!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Can the law get blood out of a stone? I haven't any money.
W Somerset Maugham
I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.
Howard Zinn
Poverty always looks the same, no matter where you come across it. The rich can always express their opulence by varying their lives. Different houses, clothes, cars. Or thoughts, dreams. But for the poor there is nothing but compulsory grayness, the only form of expression available to poverty.
Henning Mankell
For avarice begins where poverty ends.
Honoré de Balzac
In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains, though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free.
Oscar Wilde
The tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self denial.
Oscar Wilde
Despite billions of Sun, the universe is still in darkness! The wisdom of light is yet powerless!
Mehmet Murat ildan
All dark and comfortless.
William Shakespeare
Darkness uses light as bait on its fishhook!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Candle needs darkness to show its talents. Good shines only beside the bad; it disappears when the bad disappears. Where there is no darkness, candle is forgotten.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Plants turn their face to the Sun; Animals, to the ground; and Men, to the darkness!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.There is one who remembers the way to your door:Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.You shall not deny the Stranger.They constantly try to escapeFrom the darkness outside and withinBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.But the man that is shall shadowThe man that pretends to be.
T.S Eliot
You must often visit the darkness to get the people lost in the darkness out of there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.
Morris West
Darkness can always visit us; when it comes, we shall light a candle to welcome it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
Cormac McCarthy
It howled execration upon the dim camarine world of its nativity wail on wail while he lay there gibbering with palsied jawhasps, his hands putting back the night like some witless Paraclete beleaguered with all limbo's clamor.
Cormac McCarthy
They constantly try to escapeFrom the darkness outside and withinBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.But the man that is shall shadowThe man that pretends to be.
T.S Eliot
Darkness well ahead is better than darkness close by, because you can find a way to avoid the former! Search the horizons to see the storms ahead.
Mehmet Murat ildan
I opened my eyes; how could I keep them shut when I could not sleep? The same darkness brooded over me; the same unfathomable black eternity which my thoughts strove against and could not understand. I made the most despairing efforts to find a word black enough to characterize this darkness; a word so horribly black that it would darken my lips if I named it. Lord! how dark it was! and I am carried back in thought to the sea and the dark monsters that lay in wait for me. They would draw me to them, and clutch me tightly and bear me away by land and sea, through dark realms that no soul has seen. I feel myself on board, drawn through waters, hovering in clouds, sinking--sinking.
Knut Hamsun
On a waste place strewn with bricks in the outskirts of a town twilight was falling. A star or two appeared over the smoke, and distant windows lit mysterious lights. The stillness deepened and the loneliness. Then all the outcast things that are silent by day found voices.
Lord Dunsany
No matter what happens in the outside world, as long as you have faith in yourself, no darkness can touch you!
Mehmet Murat ildan