Quotes by Playwrights - Page 178

To write is your last resort when you've betrayed someone.
Jean Genet
No iron can pierce the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.
Isaac Babel
A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.
Dee Dee M. Scott
To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.
Hélène Cixous
we do not write as we want but as we can
W Somerset Maugham
At first, when an idea, a poem, or the desire to write takes hold of you, work is a pleasure, a delight, and your enthusiasm knows no bounds. But later on you work with difficulty, doggedly, desperately. For once you have committed yourself to a particular work, inspiration changes its form and becomes an obsession, like a love-affair… which haunts you night and day! Once at grips with a work, we must master it completely before we can recover our idleness.
Natalie Clifford Barney
It is the storyteller's task to elicit sympathy and a measure of understanding for those who lie outside the boundaries of State approval.
Graham Greene
An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.
Henry Fielding
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public eye with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I never drink while I'm working, but after a few glasses I get ideas that would never have occurred to me dead sober.
Irwin Shaw
A critic is a legless man who teaches other people to run
Channing Pollock
If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. tIf someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say:t'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!
Anton Chekhov
drill one hole after another into [language] until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through – I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.
Samuel Beckett
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.
Tom Stoppard
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune but to write and read comes by nature.
William Shakespeare
All writers are waiting for replies. That’s what I’ve learned. Maybe all human beings are
Niall Williams
May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.
Grant Morrison
And yet sometimes it seems to me I am there, among the incriminated scenes, tottering under the attributes peculiar to the lords of creation ... Yes, more than once I almost took myself for the other, all but suffered after his fashion, the space of an instant.
Samuel Beckett
Good girls like myself need subversion. Being solemn, I aspire to comedy. Being a novelist, I aspire to the musical. Being organized, I aspire to luminous chaos. Loving the power of grammar and the fine distinctions of language, I seek the part of the mind I didn't know was there, the part 'sheer,' 'no-manfathomed,' 'cliffs of fall.
Janet Burroway
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
William Saroyan
After being turned down by numerous publishers, he decided to write for posterity.
George Ade
La plus grande chute est celle qu'on fait du haut de l'innocence.
Heiner Müller
Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.
Athol Fugard
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
Hélène Cixous
Most writing is done between the mind and the hand, not between the hand and the page.
Janet Burroway
After all everybody, that is, everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves in order to tell what is inside themselves. That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really. The second one is romantic, is is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.
Gertrude Stein
The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.
Oscar Wilde
Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don't have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It's not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn't have done it that way., Nov. 20, 2009]
Cormac McCarthy
Behind the perfection of a man's style, must lie the passion of a man's soul.
Oscar Wilde
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation, and it seems most true when it eschews artistic devices of any sort.
Elias Canetti
Remember the good hours when the words are flowing well. And never mind the bad hours there is no life without them.
Herman Wouk
Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.
Paula Vogel
You cannot write unless you write much.
W Somerset Maugham
Happy the writer who, passing by characters that are boring, disgusting, shocking in their mournful reality, approaches characters that manifest the lofty dignity of man, who from the great pool of daily whirling images has chosen only the rare exceptions, who has never once betrayed the exalted turning of his lyre, nor descended from his height to his poor, insignificant brethren, and, without touching the ground, has given the whole of himself to his elevated images so far removed from it. Twice enviable is his beautiful lot: he is among them as in his own family; and meanwhile his fame spreads loud and far. With entrancing smoke he has clouded people's eyes; he has flattered them wondrously, concealing what is mournful in life, showing them a beautiful man. Everything rushes after him, applauding, and flies off following his triumphal chariot. Great world poet they name him, soaring high above all other geniuses in the world, as the eagle soars above the other high fliers. At the mere mention of his name, young ardent hearts are filled with trembling, responsive tears shine in all eyes...No one equals him in power--he is God! But such is not the lot, and other is the destiny of the writer who has dared to call forth all that is before our eyes every moment and which our indifferent eyes do not see--all the stupendous mire of trivia in which our life in entangled, the whole depth of cold, fragmented, everyday characters that swarm over our often bitter and boring earthly path, and with the firm strength of his implacable chisel dares to present them roundly and vividly before the eyes of all people! It is not for him to win people's applause, not for him to behold the grateful tears and unanimous rapture of the souls he has stirred; no sixteen-year-old girl will come flying to meet him with her head in a whirl and heroic enthusiasm; it is not for him to forget himself in the sweet enchantment of sounds he himself has evoked; it is not for him, finally, to escape contemporary judgment, hypocritically callous contemporary judgment, which will call insignificant and mean the creations he has fostered, will allot him a contemptible corner in the ranks of writers who insult mankind, will ascribe to him the quality of the heroes he has portrayed, will deny him heart, and soul, and the divine flame of talent. For contemporary judgment does not recognize that equally wondrous are the glasses that observe the sun and those that look at the movement of inconspicuous insect; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that much depth of soul is needed to light up the picture drawn from contemptible life and elevate it into a pearl of creation; for contemporary judgment does not recognize that lofty ecstatic laughter is worthy to stand beside the lofty lyrical impulse, and that a whole abyss separates it from the antics of the street-fair clown! This contemporary judgment does not recognize; and will turn it all into a reproach and abuse of the unrecognized writer; with no sharing, no response, no sympathy, like a familyless wayfarer, he will be left alone in the middle of the road. Grim is his path, and bitterly he will feel his solitude.
Nikolai Gogol
One hasn't become a writer until one has distilled writing intoa habit, and that habit has been forced into an obsession.Writing has to be an obsession. It has to be something as organic,physiological and psychological as speaking or sleeping or eating.
Niyi Osundare
I am a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan
When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.", May 10, 1886)
Anton Chekhov
I can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.".]
Henning Mankell
The act of writing is the act of discovering what you believe.
David Hare
All writing is filth
Antonin Artaud
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
George Bernard Shaw
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
T.S Eliot
And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.
Tennessee Williams
I think one is naturally impressed by anything having a beginning a middle and an ending when one is beginning writing and that it is a natural thing because when one is emerging from adolescence, which is really when one first begins writing one feels that one would not have been one emerging from adolescence if there had not been a beginning and a middle and an ending to anything.
Gertrude Stein
Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful.
Thomas Keneally
The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.
Marsha Norman
Formerly I believed books were made like this: a poet came, lightly opened his lips, and the inspired fool burst into song – if you please! But it seems, before they can launch a song, poets must tramp for days with callused feet, and the sluggish fish of the imagination flounders softly in the slush of the heart. And while, with twittering rhymes, they boil a broth of loves and nightingales, the tongueless street merely writhes for lack of something to shout or say
Vladimir Mayakovsky
Meditation needs no results. Meditation can have itself as an end, I meditate without words and on nothingness. What tangles my life is writing.
Hélène Cixous
The world requires me to re-write its wretched dialogue!
Richard Greenberg
To write simply is as difficult as to be good.
W Somerset Maugham
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
W Somerset Maugham
Writing is the supreme solace.
W Somerset Maugham
You don't know what love is until someone lives with you while you write a book.
Thulani Davis
It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.
Tennessee Williams
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
W Somerset Maugham
Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?~Jack or The Submission
Eugène Ionesco
I'm a drinker with writing problems.
Brendan Behan
I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.
Frances Hodgson Burnett
You just don't know writers. They'll use anything, anybody. They'll eat their young.
Dennis Potter
He read me extracts from a medical journal describing the progress of a staphylococcus aureus infection. And then he pleasured me with a potato.
Grant Morrison