Quotes by Playwrights - Page 4

NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.
Sinclair Lewis
She moves me not, or not removes at least affection's edge in me.
William Shakespeare
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
Yet should there hover in their restless headsOne thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,Which into words no virtue can digest.
Christopher Marlowe
Which gate to enter? Which path to choose? Which stairs to take? Which direction to go? These questions can be very depressive! And sometimes the solution lies in being bold, in being imprudent!
Mehmet Murat ildan
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
You are but a tiny cluster upon the vines of heaven, where the grapes are worlds; yet you hold the power to ripen your bitter berries and add to the eternal vintage of cosmic sweetness if so you will.
Eden Phillpotts
To make an elderly person happy is the noblest act a young person can ever do!
Mehmet Murat ildan
That is the definition of truth, it is the thing you must not say. “The miracle into which the child and the poet walk” [Tsvetaeva] as if walking home, and home is there…The thing that is both known and unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable is not worth the effort. Painting is trying to paint what you cannot paint and writing is writing what you cannot know before you have written: it is preknowing and not knowing, blindly, with words. It occurs at the point where blindness and light meet. Kafka says—one very small line lost in his writing—“to the depths, to the depths.
Hélène Cixous
Most people live for love and admiration. But it is by love and admiration that one should live. If any love is shown us we should recognize that we are quite unworthy of it. Nobody is worthy to be loved... or if that phrase is a bitter one to bear, let us say that everyone is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. Love is a sacrament that should be taken kneeling..
Oscar Wilde
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
Roger left the cricket stumps and they went into the drawing room. Grandpapa, at the first suggestion of reading aloud, had disappeared, taking Patch with him. Grandmama had cleared away the tea. She found her spectacles and the book. It was Black Beauty. Grandmama kept no modern children's books, and this made common ground for the three of them. She read the terrible chapter where the stable lad lets Beauty get overheated and gives him a cold drink and does not put on his blanket. The story was suited to the day. Even Roger listened entranced. And Deborah, watching her grandmother's calm face and hearing her careful voice reading the sentences, thought how strange it was that Grandmama could turn herself into Beauty with such ease. She was a horse, suffering there with pneumonia in the stable, being saved by the wise coachman.After the reading, cricket was anticlimax, but Deborah must keep her bargain. She kept thinking of Black Beauty writing the book. It showed how good the story was, Grandmama said, because no child had ever yet questioned the practical side of it, or posed the picture of a horse with a pen in its hoof."A modern horse would have a typewriter," thought Deborah, and she began to bowl to Roger, smiling to herself as she did so because of the twentieth-century Beauty clacking with both hoofs at a machine. ("The Pool")
Daphne du Maurier
Abt Draws from a trove of personal experience to create a vivid account of the people and place. Along the way, Abt addresses big questions such as economic reform and practical ones such as how to use e–commerce to achieve brand recognition in North Korea.
Jeff Baron
If books are your good friends, then a conscious life will be your best comrade all your life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
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
It is hard for us to imagine now, but our earliest human ancestors who ventured out onto the grasslands of East Africa some six million years ago were remarkably weak and vulnerable creatures. They stood less than five feet tall. They walked upright and could run on their two legs, but nowhere near as fast as the swift predators on four legs that pursued them. They were skinny—their arms could not provide much defense. They had no claws or fangs or poison to resort to if under attack. To gather fruits, nuts, and insects, or to scavenge dead meat, they had to move out into the open savanna where they became easy prey to leopards or packs of hyenas. So weak and small in number, they might have easily become extinct.And yet within the space of a few million years (remarkably short on the time scale of evolution), these rather physically unimpressive ancestors of ours transformed themselves into the most formidable hunters on the planet. What could possibly account for such a miraculous turnaround?
Robert Greene
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
When you are learning swimming, try to swim like a fish! Target the best so that you can always easily reach good and better!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It really is better to be lucky than to be good.
Jeff Lindsay
She was tall and dark-skinned and looked like a Nigerian sculpture. She moved like a lioness, her every step bristling with suppressed violence.
Bonnie Greer
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
Unless you have a free press in your country, there is no need to buy newspapers and there is no need to watch the news because there is no need to listen to the lies! And you already have one real information: You are being deceived by the people you are governed! This is an enough information for you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
What can you expect from a stupid government? Anything good? Anything useful, anything clever? Anything just? No! You can expect nothing but stupidity, nothing but mistakes, nothing but injustices and tragedies! All a stupid government can do is to produce wrecks and debris!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Any regime or any government which motivates its own people to be different than one another is a good regime, is a good government! Encourage people to think differently, to act differently, and to believe in different things, otherwise you create just a herd of animals!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Every country is a battlefield for the struggle between honest and dishonest, between honourable and honourless people! At the end, the character of that country will be determined by whichever group wins!
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
Find a secret place and be unreachable! And then, in the silence of solitude, the things you cannot reach in the crowds will meet you there!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?
Grant Morrison
Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.
George Bernard Shaw
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
If you close your door to the world of books, the gates of the world of ignorance automatically opens and quickly pulls you inside!
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
In old age, past haunts the present; memories replace the real life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
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
Like a breakfast time or lunch time, you must have a thinking time! Without eating and thinking we cannot stick to the existence; without them we cannot stay in the port of this universe!
Mehmet Murat ildan
It is impossible for me to be an Anarchist, for I do not believe in the essential goodness of man. The world, the physical world, that was once all in all to me, has at moments such as these no road through a wood, no stretch of shore, that can bring me comfort. The beauty of these things can no longer at such moments make up to me at all for the ugliness of man, his cruelty, his greed, his lying face.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Olivia: What's a drunken man like, fool?Feste: Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman: one draught above heat makes him a fool; the second mads him; and a third drowns him.
William Shakespeare
That in the captain's but a choleric word,Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.
William Shakespeare
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
HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.
George Bernard Shaw
A writer need not devour a whole sheep in order to know what mutton tastes like, but he must at least eat a chop. Unless he gets his facts right, his imagination will lead him into all kinds of nonsense, and the facts he is most likely to get right are the facts of his own experience.
W Somerset Maugham
Let those who sit know that this world is not a waiting room; it is an arena to struggle, an arena for action! Let the inactive remember that we were born to act, not to sit!
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
Yes, movies! Look at them — All of those glamorous people — having adventures — hogging it all, gobbling the whole thing up! You know what happens? People go to the movies instead of moving! Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them! Yes, until there's a war. That's when adventure becomes available to the masses! Everyone's dish, not only Gable's! Then the people in the dark room come out of the dark room to have some adventures themselves — Goody, goody! — It's our turn now, to go to the south Sea Island — to make a safari — to be exotic, far-off! — But I'm not patient. I don't want to wait till then. I'm tired of the movies and I am about to move!
Tennessee Williams
When you start your journey towards your target, walk and then rest for a while and then walk again and then rest for a while again and then walk again! Rule out the option of failure in your mind! Leave only one option available: To reach your target!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.
Antonin Artaud
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
Another preoccupation fed into this dynamic relationship between discovery and denial: does sexual abuse actually matter? Should it, in fact, be allowed? After all, it was only in the 19070s that the Paedophile Information Exchange had argued for adults’ right to have sex with children – or rather by a slippery sleight of word, PIE inverted the imperative by arguing that children should have the right to have sex with adults. This group had been disbanded after the imprisonment of Tom O’Carroll, its leader, with some of its activists bunkered in Holland’s paedophile enclaves, only to re-appear over the parapets in the sex crime controversies of the 1990s. How recent it was, then, that paedophilia was fielded as one of the liberation movements, how many of those on the left and right of the political firmament, were – and still are – persuaded that sex with children is merely another case for individual freedom?Few people in Britain at the turn of the century publicly defend adults’ rights to sex with children. But some do, and they are to be found nesting in the coalition crusading against evidence of sexual suffering. They have learned from the 1970s, masked their intentions and diverted attention on to ‘the system’. Others may not have come out for paedophilia but they are apparently content to enter into political alliances with those who have. We believe that this makes their critique of survivors and their allies unreliable. Others genuinely believe in false memories, but may not be aware of the credentials of some of their advisors.
Beatrix Campbell
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
If you can be very impartial in analysing your own past, then you will have a much better future!
Mehmet Murat ildan