Quotes by Playwrights - Page 2

Good ideas never require guns; and if an idea requires guns, it is not a good idea!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The Ph.D is one of the chosen who know that some things can never be fathomed, no matter how hard you try. What good are explanations? There is no possibility of explaining how such a work [Mozart's Requiem, in the instance] could ever have come into being. (The same holds true for certain poems, which should not be analyzed either.)
Elfriede Jelinek
The mind of Caesar. It is the reverse of most men's. It rejoices in committing itself. To us arrive each day a score of challenges; we must say yes or no to decisions that will set off chains of consequences. Some of us deliberate; some of us refuse the decision, which is itself a decision; some of us leap giddily into the decision, setting our jaws and closing our eyes, which is the sort of decision of despair. Caesar embraces decision. It is as though he felt his mind to be operating only when it is interlocking itself with significant consequences. Caesar shrinks from no responsibility. He heaps more and more upon his shoulders.
Thornton Wilder
You are whatever you shall leave behind when you leave life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in
Tennessee Williams
If ten men are trying to lynch one allegedly vile person, than we can be completely sure that there are ten vile people and one allegedly vile person over there! Don’t forget, violence makes you a low man!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To live is to paint, it is to create; but while we are painting, we are being painted, being created as well!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Each instant brought them, more momentous than the explosion of Krakatoa. It was only that no one noticed. We are to accustomed to the absurdity of existence. The loss of a universe is not worth taking seriously.
Yukio Mishima
Let us proceed under the assumption that the fairy folk do exist, and that I am not a gibbering moron.
Eoin Colfer
NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
Isn't it fun to work— or don't you ever do it? It's especially fun when your kind of work is the thing you'd rather do more than anything else in the world. I've been writing as fast as my pen would go every day this summer, and my only quarrel with life is that the days aren't long enough to write all the beautiful and valuable and entertaining thoughts I'm thinking. I've finished the second draft of my book and am going to begin the third tomorrow morning at half-past seven. It's the sweetest book you ever saw— it is, truly. I think of nothing else. I can barely wait in the morning to dress and eat before beginning; then I write and write and write till suddenly I'm so tired that I'm limp all over.
Jean Webster
Every beautiful place is your temple, you can always visit them; every useful book is your holy book, you can always read them; every place you find love is your heaven, you can always go there! Don’t get stuck in the temples, in the so-called holy books and heavens of the religions because life is much richer, much superior and much intelligent than all the religions because life is alive, it is dynamic and it continuously develops itself!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If a woman cannot make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.
Oscar Wilde
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: … But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I'm neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.(Act I., lines 132-140)
Oscar Wilde
After three years of English at Cambridge, being force-fed literary theory, I was almost convinced that literature was all coded messages about Marxism and the death of the self. I crawled out of the post-structuralist desert thirsty for heroines I could cry and laugh with. I was jaded. I craved trash.
Samantha Ellis
You cannot call a man as a good person just because he is treating you good! He should treat everyone good to be good!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It really is better to be lucky than to be good.
Jeff Lindsay
The asylum, and later the national health service, warehoused thousands of patients made mad by the intrusions of a sexual predator. But these institutions had been dominated by the discredited Freudian fantasy that sexual abuse doesn’t happen - that it is our illicit desires that drive us crazy. A century ago, Freud recoiled from his own theory of the sexual seduction of children and projected the problem back into the patient. He claimed in his Aetiology of Hysteria that clients, typically women, were describing their fantasies, not facts, not ‘real events’. P3
Beatrix Campbell
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
George Bernard Shaw
We belong far less to where we've come from than where we want to go.
Franz Werfel
The people he met, the places he passed, were all steps in his journey, and he kept a place inside his heart for each of them.
Rachel Joyce
If a country is not governed well, all sort of disasters will become a routine of that country!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You exist because the universe exists. You owe your existence to the universe. You may call the universe as god or something else, it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: Thank to it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We are unimportant creatures in this universe. We are all alone for the moment. Nobody has ever sent us any holy book or whatsoever. To survive in this universe we must first understand that nobody can help us, nobody but ourselves! To be important creatures in this universe means is to be able to shape this universe in such a way that our existence become everlasting!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To attack terrorism, firstly attack the ignorance which is the greatest source of terrorism! Attack the ignorance worldwide because ignorance often creates sick minds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel,1918)
Stefan Zweig
Are you comfortable? That’s good. But there is somewhere at least someone is uncomfortable! And this should somehow make you uncomfortable too! The world can be a better place only through this way, through thinking others!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The more you keep your door closed, the more you will rot! Open your door! Let different ideas, different beliefs, different cultures and different attitudes flow into your mind. Anything different will help you to enlarge your little world! By opening your door, you invite the whole universe to your tiny house! Enlarge your house and enrich yourself! As long as your door remains closed, you shall continue rotting in your poor world!
Mehmet Murat ildan
To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?
Charles Fuller
You spoke your words as though you denied the very existence of the shadows or of evil. Think, now: where would your good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like without shadow?
Mikhail Bulgakov
My hate is general, I detest all men;Some because they are wicked and do evil,Others because they tolerate the wicked,Refusing them the active vigorous scornWhich vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.
Molière
..What our contempt often hurls from us,We wish it our again; the present pleasure,By revolution lowering,does becomeThe opposite of itself..
William Shakespeare
Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a Colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonorable graves.Men at some time are masters of their fates.The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our starsBut in ourselves, that we are underlings.
William Shakespeare
JASON: 'Intended wings.' How depressing.MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons.JASON: No - no, it doesn't. It could mean the wings were 'intended' to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they were defective in some way, these wings, so the pigeons aren't suicidal, not at all, just badly equipped for flying. Like the rest of us.
Simon Gray
No art can possibly comfort HER then, even though art is credited with so many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place.
Elfriede Jelinek
In the New Year, never forget to thank to your past years because they enabled you to reach today! Without the stairs of the past, you cannot arrive at the future!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water.
W Somerset Maugham
Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)
Samuel Beckett
When peoples cry for you, they can straighten out your soul.
Langston Hughes
The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving masks.
Oscar Wilde
Sometimes a strong wind blows suddenly and you leave your beloved tree without saying even goodbye, like a pale autumn leaf! This uncertainty of life makes every moment in life infinitely precious.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Good literature is a lifeboat! Every time you feel you are sinking, jump on it!
Mehmet Murat ildan
When modern values and modern people are under attack in a country, we can be sure of a dark future in that country!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is the artist who tries to gradually accustom people to the possibilities of a better state of things.
Catherine Amy Dawson Scott
What infinite heart's-easeMust kings neglect, that private men enjoy!And what have kings, that privates have not too,Save ceremony, save general ceremony?And what art thou, thou idle ceremony?What kind of god art thou, that suffer'st moreOf mortal griefs than do thy worshippers?What are thy rents? what are thy comings in?O ceremony, show me but thy worth!What is thy soul of adoration?Art thou aught else but place, degree and form,Creating awe and fear in other men?Wherein thou art less happy being fear'dThan they in fearing.What drink'st thou oft, instead of homage sweet,But poison'd flattery? O, be sick, great greatness,And bid thy ceremony give thee cure!Think'st thou the fiery fever will go outWith titles blown from adulation?Will it give place to flexure and low bending?Canst thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee,Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream,That play'st so subtly with a king's repose;I am a king that find thee, and I know'Tis not the balm, the sceptre and the ball,The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,The farced title running 'fore the king,The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pompThat beats upon the high shore of this world,No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,Not all these, laid in bed majestical,Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave,Who with a body fill'd and vacant mindGets him to rest, cramm'd with distressful bread;Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,But, like a lackey, from the rise to setSweats in the eye of Phoebus and all nightSleeps in Elysium; next day after dawn,Doth rise and help Hyperion to his horse,And follows so the ever-running year,With profitable labour, to his grave:And, but for ceremony, such a wretch,Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep,Had the fore-hand and vantage of a king.The slave, a member of the country's peace,Enjoys it; but in gross brain little wotsWhat watch the king keeps to maintain the peace,Whose hours the peasant best advantages.
William Shakespeare
An uneducated society will eventually turn into something lower than a herd of animals!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A society with lynch culture needs a big zoo, not for the animals definitely, but for the very people themselves!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?' Nyawira asked rather sharply. 'Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in life, especially in times of misery? She can marry or live with a man. She can bear children and bring them up, and be abused by her man. Have you read Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria, Joys of Motherhood? Tsitsi Dangarembga of Zimbabwe, say, Nervous Conditions? Miriama Ba of Senegal, So Long A Letter? Three women from different parts of Africa, giving words to similar thoughts about the condition of women in Africa.''I am not much of a reader of fiction,' Kamiti said. 'Especially novels by African women. In India such books are hard to find.''Surely even in India there are women writers? Indian women writers?' Nyawira pressed. 'Arundhati Roy, for instance, The God of Small Things? Meena Alexander, Fault Lines? Susie Tharu. Read Women Writing in India. Or her other book, We Were Making History, about women in the struggle!''I have sampled the epics of Indian literature,' Kamiti said, trying to redeem himself. 'Mahabharata, Ramayana, and mostly Bhagavad Gita. There are a few others, what they call Purana, Rig-Veda, Upanishads … Not that I read everything, but …''I am sure that those epics and Puranas, even the Gita, were all written by men,' Nyawira said. 'The same men who invented the caste system. When will you learn to listen to the voices of women?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
Of all creatures that can feel and think,we women are the worst treated things alive
Euripides
Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable
Diane Samuels
You mustn’t throw them away. Let me have them.
Diane Samuels
It is good to be imperfect so that we retain our joy to work hard to rise to perfection!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Okay baby, let's take this rocket to Uranus. This hoor is perfect, and she can act as well.
Irvine Welsh
Seduced her? Every time I turned round she was up a library ladder. In the end I gave in. That reminds me—I spotted something between her legs that made me think of you.
Tom Stoppard
Wherever in the world a country is governed by spiritually ill, politically empty, ethically rotten and mentally stupid people, over there you can find nothing but chaos, tears and fire!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A waterfall cannot be silent, just as the wisdom! When they speak, the voice of power speaks!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every command leaves behind a painful sting in the person who is forced to carry it out.
Elias Canetti
The strength of your mind determines the depth of your desperation! The weaker the mind, the deeper the desperation!
Mehmet Murat ildan
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
George Bernard Shaw