Quotes by Playwrights - Page 133

Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery".
John Gay
Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other. Though it is irregular, it is less boring this way, and besides, neither of them loses anything through my infidelity.
Anton Chekhov
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one’s own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as if it had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
Oscar Wilde
He whom the gods love dies young.
Menander
Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking in the sun.
Dacia Maraini
I think that the thematic, formal history of the literary form ultimately harkens back to a different political system. That is to say, a feudal order: the aristocratic dispensation of leisure time, the refinements of the self. With the shift from feudal aristocracy to democracy there has been a long process of evolution. I think we’re in the throes of a kind of steep, logarithmic shift, and I think that literary forms are losing their capacity to connect people to issues, to the experiences that feel most meaningful to them.
Ayad Akhtar
Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin'd,Man walks at large, a Pris'ner of the Mind
John Dryden
He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood.
Carson McCullers
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read
Oscar Wilde
Literature decays only as men become more and more corrupt.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That such a slave as this should wear a sword,Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these,Like rats, oft bite the holy cords atwainWhich are too intrinse t' unloose; smooth every passionThat in the natures of their lords rebel,Being oil to the fire, snow to the colder moods,Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaksWith every gale and vary of their mastersKnowing naught, like dogs, but following.
William Shakespeare
Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs
Cormac McCarthy
A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound.
Cormac McCarthy
This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea.
Cormac McCarthy
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.
Oscar Wilde
They began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of horses and mules that travelers had stood afoot.
Cormac McCarthy
Dakin: The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers.Scripps: No.Dakin: It's consolation. All literature is consolation.
Alan Bennett
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
They passed, leaving a trail of foxfire shuffled up out of the wet leaves like stars plowed in a ship's wake.
Cormac McCarthy
They filed out in descending order by altitudes, the father first, out through the sunlit doors in a sextet of calico isotropes and into the street, the elder smiling, along through the crowds and down the road toward the river still single file and with deadpan decorum leaving behind a congregation mute and astounded.
Cormac McCarthy
When the owner of the pig arrived he found a scrawny and bloodcovered white boychild standing on what was left of his property sawing at it with a knife and hauling on the skin and cursing. The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.
Cormac McCarthy
His feet went banging down some stairs. He closed his eyes. They went through cinders and dirt, his heels gathering small windrows of trash. A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. He lay with his head on the moldy upholstery of an old car seat among packingcrates and broken shoes and suncrazed rubber toys in the dark. Something warm was running on his chest. He put up a hand. I am bleeding. Unto my death.
Cormac McCarthy
Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs.
Cormac McCarthy
I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up.
Alan Bennett
Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.
Anton Chekhov
Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You want to go to a place where you never lose anything and you keep gaining many things? Go to the Land Of Literature where you gain new paths, new ideas, new lives, new goals, and new souls!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Literature is an invitation to people to discover the world of others and the world of others is the best source to understand and to improve our own world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Journalism is unreadable, and literature is unread.
Oscar Wilde
Like some wondrous birds out of fairy tales, books sang their songs to me and spoke to me as though communing with one languishing in prison; they sang of the variety and richness of life, of man’s audacity in his strivings towards goodness and beauty.
Maxim Gorky
I wished, first of all, to buy my way into people's good graces with my book so that, in subsequent personal contact, I would find the ground already prepared, and, I reasoned, if I succeeded in implanting in their soules a favorable image of me, this image would in turn shape me; and so, willy-nilly, I would become mature.
Witold Gombrowicz
Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
Maxim Gorky
Estragon: You see, you feel worse when I'm with you. I feel better alone, too.Vladmir: Then why do you always come crawling back?Estragon: I don't know.
Samuel Beckett
POLONIUS : My Lord, I will use them according to their desert.HAMLET : God's bodykins man, better. Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
William Shakespeare
Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I'm denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.
Saadat Hasan Manto
Words, words were truly alive on the tongue, in the head, warm, beating, frantic, winged; music and blood.
Carol Ann Duffy
I wrote when I did not know life;now that I know life, I have no more to say.
Oscar Wilde
Yes, looking through the eyes of literature we may talk about the beauty of sadness! But in the eyes of truth, sadness is just saddening; there is no beauty there, only a touching desperation!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Say a day without the ever.
William Shakespeare
Their ghosts are gagged, their books are library flotsam,Some of their names - not all - we learnt in schoolBut, life being short, we rarely read their poems,Mere source-books now to point or except a rule,While those opinions which rank them high are basedOn a wish to be different or on lack of taste.
Louis MacNeice
Don't forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session probably, when the freshman come up.
J.M. Barrie
If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A word aptly uttered or written cannot be cut away by an axe.
Nikolai Gogol
Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries -- slave of prejudice … slave of religious fanaticism … slave of barbarity and inhumanity.
Saadat Hasan Manto
You must remember that no one lives a life free from pain and suffering.
Sophocles
In the course of time, Michael Strogoff reached a high station in the Empire. But it is not the history of his success, but the history of his trials, which deserves to be related.
Jules Verne
We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.
James Elroy Flecker
Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice – where Mrs. Bennet says 'Netherfield Park is let a last.' And then Mr. Bennet goes over to call on the rich new owner.
Dodie Smith
Literature is that which denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified.
Kathy Acker
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
Literature always anticipates life. It doesn't copy it but moulds it to it's purpose.
Oscar Wilde
...and it is also possible, that Saadat Hasan dies, but Manto remains alive.
Saadat Hasan Manto
If any man wish to write in a clear style, let him be first clear in his thoughts; and if any would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress. When I get fed up with one, I spend the night with the other
Anton Chekhov
The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
Oscar Wilde
Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.
Witold Gombrowicz
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
William Shakespeare
It's about people who still are unaware. Therefore they strive to live by all means: love like no one before them loved, believe like no one ever believed, desire like no one else ever desired...
Marius Ivaškevičius
If others in the same Glass better see 'Tis for Themselves they look, but not for me: For my Salvation must its Doom receive Not from what others, but what I believe.
John Dryden