Quotes by Playwrights - Page 39

From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.
Maxwell Anderson
A walking shadow a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.
William Shakespeare
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does straight to our emotions deep into the twilight room of the soul.
Ingmar Bergman
The play was a great success but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds come home to roost.
Arthur Miller
When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.
Luigi Pirandello
A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.
Jean Anouilh
Let a man accept his destiny. No pity and no tears.
Euripides
What cannot be avoided t'were childish weakness to lament or fear.
William Shakespeare
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Oscar Wilde
Things past redress are now with me past care.
William Shakespeare
I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
Science says: "We must live " and seeks the means of prolonging increasing facilitating and amplifying life of making it tolerable and acceptable wisdom says: "We must die " and seeks how to make us die well.
Miguel de Unamuno
Happy he who learns to bear what he cannot change!
J. C. F. von Schiller
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored in climate that seem to me the happiest but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both.
T.S Eliot
Nothing you write if you hope to be any good will ever come out as you first hoped.
Lillian Hellman
We do not write as we want but as we can.
W Somerset Maugham
The best thing we can do is to make wherever we're lost look as much like home as we can.
Christopher Fry
Happy the man who early learns the wide chasm that lies between his wishes and his powers.
Johann von Goethe
He who cannot do what he wants must make do with what he can.
Terence
Don't be sad don't be angry if life deceives you! Submit to your grief your time for joy will come believe me.
Aleksandr Pushkin
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
George Bernard Shaw
Much sheer effort goes into avoiding the truth left to itself it sweeps in like the tide.
Fay Weldon
There is no armor against fate death lays his icy hands on kings.
James Shirley
Against necessity against its strength no one can fight and win.
Aeschylus
How base a thing it is when a man will struggle with necessity! We have to die.
Euripides
Who except the gods can live without any pain?
Aeschylus
Long is the road from conception to completion.
Molière
How many 'coming men' has one known? Where on earth do they all go to?
Arthur Wing Pinero
Good morning, Eeyore," said Pooh."Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it is a good morning, which I doubt," said he."Why, what's the matter?""Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it.""Can't all what?" said Pooh, rubbing his nose."Gaiety. Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush.
A.A. Milne
In following your inclinations and moving toward mastery, you make a great contribution to society, enriching it with discoveries and insights, and making the most of the diversity in nature and among human society.
Robert Greene
The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.
Anton Chekhov
What! because we are poor Shall we be vicious?
John Webster
Seek ye not riches, seek but the society of good men.
Nikolai Gogol
Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.
Henry Becque
But man, proud man,Dress'd in a little brief authority,Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd—His glassy essence—like an angry apePlays such fantastic tricks before high heavenAs makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,Would all themselves laugh mortal.
William Shakespeare
in every pleasure, cruelty has its place...
Oscar Wilde
To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.
Yukio Mishima
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
Bernard Shaw George
Some things are not forgiveable. Deliberate cruelty is not forgiveable. It is the most unforgiveable thing in my opinion, and the one thing in which I have never, ever been guilty.
Tennessee Williams
Deliberate cruelty is unforgivable.--Blanche Dubois
Tennessee Williams
It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.
Jean Genet
How can we explain such inclinations? They are forces within us that come from a deeper place than conscious words can express.They draw us to certain experiences and away from others.
Robert Greene
There are many lights in the shadows and many shadows in the lights; lots of talents in the shades, lots of incompetents in the luminosities.
Mehmet Murat ildan
The greatest talents often lie buried out of sight.
Plautus
First of all, they came to take the gypsiesand I was happy because they pilfered.Then they came to take the Jews and I said nothing, because they were unpleasant to me.Then they came to take homosexuals,and I was relieved, because they were annoying me.Then they came to take the Communists,and I said nothing because I was not a Communist.One day they came to take me,and there was nobody left to protest.Bertold Brecht, inspired by Emil Gustav Friedrich Martin Niemöller
Bertolt Brecht
Sadly, it is within the religious domain that the phenomenon of rhetorical hysteria takes its most devastating form. I am aware that, in some minds, this tends to be regarded as a delicate subject. Let me declare very simply that I do not share such a sentiment. There is nothing in the least delicate about the slaughter of innocents. We all subscribe to the lofty notions contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but, for some reason, become suddenly coy and selective when it comes to defending what is obviously the most elementary of these rights, which is the right to life. One of my all-time favourite lines comes from the black American poet Langston Hughes. It reads, simply, 'There is no lavender word for lynch'.
Wole Soyinka
We must look hopeful.
Jerome Lawrence
The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.
Cormac McCarthy
My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.
David Mamet
THOMASINA:But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!
Tom Stoppard
A peevish self-willed harlotry it is.*She’s a stubborn little brat.*
William Shakespeare
What man art thou that, thus bescreened in night,So stumblest on my counsel?*Who are you? Why do you hide in the darkness and listen to my private thoughts?*
William Shakespeare
What are you doing sister? / Killing swine.
William Shakespeare
Rocher was on the floor, crawling on her stomach toward Jate's feet. "I love you...," she kept repeating, in a demonic whisper. "I have to show you... my butt.
Paul Rudnick
Of what earthly use were novels? How did they help anybody?
Damon Galgut
I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Oscar Wilde
When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.
Dodie Smith
I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.
William Trevor