Quotes by Playwrights - Page 2

I'd three times sooner go to war than suffer childbirth once.
Euripides
It's interesting, isn't it? . . . the chandelier . . . it reminds me of mushroom soup.
Tennessee Williams
Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!It seems she hangs upon the cheek of nightLike a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear,Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.So shows a snowy dove trooping with crowsAs yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand.Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
William Shakespeare
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?
Tom Stoppard
No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.
Sophocles
Art, like Nature, has her monsters
Oscar Wilde
I pictured love as a big hairy giant with a dead fish in his mouth. Grizzly bear claws and his heart half out of his chest cause it’s too big and the lungs have to fit. He never stops walking. Over mountains. Through the desert. On top of icy lakes. Past huge cities. And he hunts and kills for you and always comes back with plenty to eat.
Adam Rapp
There are many monsters, oh, many!
Damon Galgut
Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.
Oscar Wilde
Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense. They listen so much that they forget to be natural. This is a nice story.
Gertrude Stein
You must live in a place where you can walk safely all alone even after midnights!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you are close to a precipice, go away a bit; if you are far from it, come close a bit! Enjoy the safety, enjoy the view! Without safety, it is dangerous; without view, it is dull! Life is an art of adjusting the distances!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde
Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.
Richard Hughes
Closer, it’s all right. Touch the man of grief.Do. Don’t be afraid. My troubles are mine and I am the only man alive who can sustain them.
Sophocles
A day without laugh is a day without life.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Laugh represents a fragile glory of the mankind in this cruel and uncertain universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Those who know the least obey the best.
George Farquhar
Do you remember the long orphanage of the train stationsWe crossed cities that turn-tabled all dayAnd vomited at night the sunshine of the day ("The Voyager")
Pierre Albert-Birot
The City is free of sinThe snow has given it absolution A man who slips A horse that fallsOh no, the city is in a nightgown
Pierre Albert-Birot
You can never make a city as clean as the nature itself. To do this, you must completely demolish the city and convert it into the pure nature.
Mehmet Murat ildan
A city full of art is a city full of wit!
Mehmet Murat ildan
For a city to be beautiful, it must have a mysterious air!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is perfectly banal to establish a city in the middle of nature but it is perfectly extraordinary to establish nature in the middle of a city! Ordinary nations do the first, extraordinary nations do the second!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...all this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us.
Nikolai Gogol
There are great roads, beautiful bridges, lovely parks, gorgeous gardens and wonderful buildings in a big city. But there is something missing, something very important: The spirit of nature!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you don’t hear the crows of the roosters in the mornings, you are one cursed city fellow!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...
T.S Eliot
Crabbed age and youth cannot live together Youth is full of pleasure age is full of care Youth like summer morn age like winter weather Youth like summer brave age like winter bare. Youth is full sport age's breath is short Youth is nimble age is lame Youth is hot and bold age is weak and cold Youth is wild age is tame. Age I do abhor thee youth I do adore thee.
William Shakespeare
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Friedrich von Schiller
Yes you may depend upon it he has the ability! He is the younger generation that stands ready to knock at my door - to make an end of Halvard Solness.
Henrik Ibsen
It's all that the young can do for the old to shock them and keep them up to date.
George Bernard Shaw
You never see the old austerity That was the essence of civility Young people hereabouts unbridled now Just want.
Molière
The joy of the young is to disobey - but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
Jean Cocteau
When a man of 40 falls in love with a girl of 20 it isn't her youth he is seeking but his own.
Lenore Coffee
An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better a little better.
T.S Eliot
I write for myself and strangers. The strangers dear Readers are an afterthought.
Gertrude Stein
The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies
Please never despise the translator. He's the mailman of human civilization.
Alexander Pushkin
I've put my genius into my life I've only put my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
My own experience is that once a story has been written one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying . . . one must ruthlessly suppress everything that is not concerned with the subject. If in the first chapter you say there is a gun hanging on the wall you should make quite sure that it is going to be used further on in the story.
Anton Chekhov
They're fancy talkers about themselves writers. If I had to give young writers advice I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Lillian Hellman
The most lasting reputation I have is for an almost ferocious aggressiveness when in fact I am amiable indulgent affectionate shy and rather timid at heart.
J.B. Priestley
Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until death.
Edna Ferber
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.
George Bernard Shaw
I suppose some editors are failed writers - but so are most writers.
T.S Eliot
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
George Bernard Shaw
The writer is committed when he plunges to the very depths of himself with the intent to disclose not his individuality but his person in the complex society that conditions and supports him.
Jean-Paul Sartre
A person who publishes a book appears willfully in public with his pants down.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Writers should be read - but neither seen nor heard.
Daphne du Maurier
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.
Sir Walter Scott
Sweet are the uses of adversity.
William Shakespeare
The same wind that extinguishes a light can set a brazier on fire.
Pierre de Beaumarchais
Our real blessings often appear to us in the shape of pains losses and disappointments but let us have patience and we soon shall see them in their proper figures.
Joseph Addison
There is in the worst of fortune the best of chances for a happy change.
Euripides
If you will call your troubles experiences and remember that every experience develops some latent force within you you will grow vigorous and happy however adverse your circumstances may seem to be.
John Heywood
To conquer without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille
The greater the obstacle the more glory in overcoming it.
Molière
Worry less about what other people think about you and more about what you think about them.
Fay Weldon