Quotes by Playwrights - Page 179

What I adore is supreme professionalism. I’m bored by writers who can write only when it’s raining.
Noël Coward
If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.
Aaron Sorkin
It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.
Gertrude Stein
I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.
Tennessee Williams
If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
Thornton Wilder
When I write, it's everything that we don't know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking.
Hélène Cixous
President Bartlet: There's a delegation of cardiologists having their pictures taken in the Blue Room. You wouldn't think you could find a group of people more arrogant than the fifteen of us, but there they are, right upstairs in the Blue Room.
Aaron Sorkin
People who understand everything get no stories.
Bertolt Brecht
Every scene should be able to answer three questions: "Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don't get it? Why now?
David Mamet
10 Steps to Becoming a Better WriterWrite.Write more.Write even more.Write even more than that.Write when you don’t want to.Write when you do.Write when you have something to say.Write when you don’t.Write every day.Keep writing.
Brian Clark
I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level.
Aaron Sorkin
Would you like to know the great drama of my life? It is that I have put my genius into my life...I have put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.
Cormac McCarthy
In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!", May 10, 1886)
Anton Chekhov
A writer doesn’t solve problems. He allows them to emerge.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Never put off writing until you are better at it.
Gary Henderson
I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?
Irwin Shaw
Even at the time—twenty years old—I said to myself: better to go hungry, to go to prison, to be a tramp, than to sit at an office desk ten hours a day. There is no particular daring in this vow, but I have not broken it and shall not do so. The wisdom of my grandfathers sat in my head: we are born for the pleasure of work, fighting, love, we are born for that and nothing else. (Guy de Maupassant)
Isaac Babel
Romanticism is the abuse of adjectives
Alfred de Musset
Only amateurs say that they write for their own amusement. Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth. Writing may be interesting, absorbing, exhilarating, racking, relieving. But amusing? Never!
Edna Ferber
When I stop working the rest of the day is posthumous. I'm only really alive when I'm writing.
Tennessee Williams
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Margaret: Can I - can I just say something for the future?Leo: Yeah.Margaret: I can sign the President's name. I have his signature down pretty good.Leo: You can sign the President's name?Margaret: Yeah.Leo: On a document removing him from power and handing it to someone else?Margaret: Yeah! Or... do you think the White House Counsel would say that was a bad idea?Leo: I think the White House Counsel would say it was a coup d'etat!Margaret: Well. I'd probably end up doing some time for that.Leo: I would think. And what the hell were you doing practicing the President's signature?Margaret: It was just for fun.
Aaron Sorkin
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.", October 31, 1977]
John Osborne
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.Take off from here.
Seamus Heaney
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.
Tom Stoppard
When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don't. I have a knack for disturbing.
Jean Cocteau
Tell the story as if it were only of interest to the small circle of your characters, of which you may be one. There is no other way to put life into the story.
Horacio Quiroga
No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.
Isaac Babel
I think no more than a week after I started writing I ran into the first block. It's hard to describe it in a way that will be understandable to anyone who is not a neurotic. I will try. All my life I have been haunted by the obsession that to desire a thing or to love a thing intensely is to place yourself in a vulnerable position, to be a possible, if not a probable, loser of what you most want. Let's leave it like that. That block has always been there and always will be, and my chance of getting, or achieving, anything that I long for will always be gravely reduced by the interminable existence of that block.
Tennessee Williams
Seperti apakah Anda? Menurut saya, paling tidak Anda adalah apa yang Anda tulis.
Helvy Tiana Rosa
Toby: All right. It couldn't have gone far, right?Sam: No.Toby: Somewhere in this building...is our talent.
Aaron Sorkin
You are either born a writer or you are not.
Cormac McCarthy
So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one's days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.
Graham Greene
I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.
W Somerset Maugham
As a writer, I need an enormous amount of time alone. Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials. It's a matter of doing everything you can to avoid writing, until it is about four in the morning and you reach the point where you have to write. Having anybody watching that or attempting to share it with me would be grisly.
Paul Rudnick
Membaca dan menulis membuatmu menjadi.
Helvy Tiana Rosa
Better a good journalist than a poor assassin.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I love writing, but hate starting. The page is awfully white and it says, 'You may have fooled some of the people some of the time but those days are over, Giftless. I'm not your agent and I'm not your mommy: I'm a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?' and I really, really don't. I'll go peaceable-like.
Aaron Sorkin
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller
Mrs. Landingham, does the President have free time this morning?" "The President has nothing but free time, Toby. Right now he's in the residence eating Cheerios and enjoying Regis and Kathie Lee. Should I get him for you?" "Sarcasm's a disturbing thing coming from a woman of your age, Mrs. Landingham." "What age would that be, Toby?""Late twenties?" "Atta boy.
Aaron Sorkin
Buku yang kau tulis adalah semacam jejak yang terus menyala di dunia, dan bisa menjadi cahaya akhiratmu.
Helvy Tiana Rosa
I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if I do not live.
Françoise Sagan
Perhaps if I make myself write I shall find out what is wrong with me.
Dodie Smith
The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.
Arthur Miller
A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn't tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.
Betty Smith
When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.
Oscar Wilde
Only a mediocre person is always at his best.
W Somerset Maugham
I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.
Cormac McCarthy
I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
Appearance blinds, whereas words reveal.
Oscar Wilde
Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.
Molière
Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
The person born with a talent they are meant to use will find their greatest happiness in using it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.
Graham Greene
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
You are what you write.
Helvy Tiana Rosa
Women want love to be a novel. Men, a short story.
Daphne du Maurier
There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
W Somerset Maugham
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Oscar Wilde