Quotes by Playwrights - Page 38

(A country where) the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
Oscar Wilde
Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers come to dust.
William Shakespeare
Growing old - it's not nice but it's interesting.
August Strindberg
Earth is here so kind that just tickle her with a hoe and she laughs with a harvest.
Douglas Jerrold
When that the poor have cried Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious And Brutus is an honourable man.
William Shakespeare
In the last few years everything I'd done up to sixty or so has seemed very childish.
T.S Eliot
My opportunities were still there nay they multiplied tenfold but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.
George Bernard Shaw
Age is a high price to pay for maturity.
Tom Stoppard
When you are forty half of you belongs to the past. . . And when you are seventy nearly all of you.
Jean Anouilh
To an old man any place that's warm is homeland.
Maxim Gorky
Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.
Pietro Aretino
One of the delights known to age and beyond the grasp of youth is that of 'not going'!
J.B. Priestley
A man of sixty has spent twenty years in bed and over three years in eating.
Arnold Bennett
The young feel tired at the end of an action The old at the beginning.
T.S Eliot
Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?
William Shakespeare
Middle age snuffs out more talent than even wars or sudden deaths do.
Richard Hughes
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
T.S Eliot
Age cannot wither her nor custom stale Her infinite variety.
William Shakespeare
An old man is twice a child.
William Shakespeare
The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.
Oscar Wilde
You must not think sir to catch old birds with chaff.
Cervantes
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.
Oscar Wilde
Sweet are the uses of adversity Which like the toad ugly and venomous Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
William Shakespeare
There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
Brendan Behan
You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
George Bernard Shaw
Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.
Henry Fielding
Your first big trouble can be a bonanza if you live through it. Get through the first trouble and you'll probably make it through the next one.
Ruth Gordon
Don't look forward to the day when you stop suffering. Because when it comes you'll know you're dead.
Tennessee Williams
They merit more praise who know how to suffer misery than those who temper themselves in contentment.
Pietro Aretino
The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound.
Maureen Duffy
Pain makes man think. Thought makes man wise. Wisdom makes life endurable.
John Patrick
Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Down you mongrel Death! Back into your kennel!
Edna Saint Vincent Millay
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
Necessity is often the spur to genius.
Honoré de Balzac
I have always been pushed by the negative.... The apparent failure of a play sends me back to my typewriter that very night before the reviews are out. I am more compelled to get back to work than if I had a success.
Tennessee Williams
For me life is a challenge. And it will be a challenge if I live to be a hundred or if I get to be a trillionaire.
Beah Richards
Adversity is to me at least a tonic and a bracer.
Sir Walter Scott
The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
Sophocles
He that is overcautious will accomplish little.
Friedrich von Schiller
What's done can't be undone.
William Shakespeare
Heaven ne'er helps the men who will not act.
Sophocles
Admiration is a very short-lived passion that immediately decays upon growing familiar with its object.
Joseph Addison
Much that I sought I could not find much that I found I could not bind much that I bound I could not free much that I freed returned to me.
Lee Wilson Dodd
Try first thyself and after call in God For to the worker God himself lends aid.
Euripides
Why then the world's mine oyster Which I with sword will open.
William Shakespeare
Action is eloquence.
William Shakespeare
Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.
Eugène Ionesco
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
Miguel de Cervantes
When an actor has money he doesn't send letters but telegrams.
Anton Chekhov
The play's the thing.
William Shakespeare
But search the land of living men Where wilt thou find their like again.
Sir Walter Scott
Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.
Dodie Smith
Satire is what closes Saturday night.
George S. Kaufman
A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time then I know it can't be much good.
T.S Eliot
A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
I sometimes wish they would swagger more now buy bigger overcoats and wilder hats and retain those traces of make-up that put them outside respectability and keep them rogues and vagabonds which is what at heart - bless 'em - they are.
J.B. Priestley
Actor-manager - one to whom the part is greater than the whole.
Ronald Jeans
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
Thornton Wilder
Many plays certainly mine are like blank cheques. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder