Quotes by Playwrights - Page 49

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
George Bernard Shaw
The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called “patriotism” and “love of sport.
Sinclair Lewis
The score never interested me, only the game.
Mae West
What is awakening? Awakening is the cessation of self-deception! Religion is self-deception; fate is self-deception; the idea that there is no death but only continuation is a self-deception! Real awakening is to acquire a scientific mind, it is to meet face to face with the bare realities, and it is to leave the spiritual fallacies and fantasies! And this is real awakening!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The biggest awakening is the awakening from the childish deceptions and the invented tales of the religion.
Mehmet Murat ildan
For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses.
Oscar Wilde
Ruin, therefore, is not caused by lavatories but it's something that starts in people's heads. So when these clowns start shouting "Stop the ruin!" - I laugh!' 'I swear to you, I find it laughable! Every one of them needs to hit himself on the back of the head and then when he has knocked all the hallucinations out of himself and gets on with sweeping out backyards - which is his real job - all this "ruin" will automatically disappear
Mikhail Bulgakov
The train resembles the Soviet type and is quite comfortable, but all socialist structures I have ever encountered have toilets stemming from a single model engineered by the Orthodox Church in Tsarist Russia to ensure that man never be allowed to forget the corruption of the flesh.
Arthur Miller
Stop fretting and eat your Madeira Cake..
Diane Samuels
The closest thing to being cared for is to care for someone else.
Carson McCullers
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing
William Saroyan
He was already beginning, as always happens at a respectable age, to take a firm stand for Raphael and the old masters––not because he was fully convinced of their lofty merit, but so as to shove them in the faces of young artists.
Nikolai Gogol
I came there again another time. And I looked many times again. I was filled with consolation, with my consolation.The thirty-three abominations were truthful. They were the truth. They were life. The sharp fragments of life, sharp, complete moments. Such are women. They have lovers.Each of these thirty-three (or how many of them were there?) had painted his mistress. Excellent! I grew used to myself being in their presence.Thirty-three mistresses! Thirty-three mistresses!And I was all of them and yet all were not me.I studied the abomination for a long while: before I modeled for them, as well as afterwards.I modelled in order to study. This I felt so keenly. It seemed to me that I was learning about life by pieces, by separate pieces, fragments, but every fragment possessed all its own complexity and power.The abominations began to divide in half. With every day this became clearer. One half became mistresses and the other half queens.Each of the thirty-three created his mistress or his queen.("Thirty Three Abominations")
Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal
He never looks you straight in the eye; or if he does, it is somehow vaguely, indefinitely; he does not pierce you with the hawk's eye or the falcon's gaze of a cavalry officer. The reason for that is that he sees, at one and the same time, both your features and those of some plaster Hercules standing in his room, or else he imagines a painting of his own that he still means to produce. That is why his responses are often incoherent, not to the point, and the muddle of things in his head increases his timidity all the more.
Nikolai Gogol
Flying is not only the art of the birds, but it is also the art of the artists!
Mehmet Murat ildan
We are a race of artists. What are we doing about it?
Shirley Graham Du Bois
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
Oscar Wilde
Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.
Oscar Wilde
GUIL (quietly): Where we went wrong was getting on a boat. We can move, of course, change direction, rattle about, but our movement is contained within a larger one that carries us along as inexorably as the wind and current…
Tom Stoppard
Northumberland, thou ladder wherewithal the mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne.
William Shakespeare
What's this?" he inquired, none too pleasantly. "A circus?""No, Julius. It's the end of the circus.""I see. And these are the clowns?"Foaly's head poked through the doorway."Pardon me for interrupting your extended circus metaphor, but what the hell is that?
Eoin Colfer
Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that
Oscar Wilde
Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly.
Oscar Wilde
The internet was supposed to liberate knowledge, but in fact it buried it, first under a vast sewer of ignorance, laziness, bigotry, superstition and filth and then beneath the cloak of political surveillance. Now...cyberspace exists exclusively to promote commerce, gossip and pornography. And of course to hunt down sedition. Only paper is safe. Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar, you have to hold it, you have to read it.
Ben Elton
Do you want to kill his love for you? What sort of existence will he have if you rob him of the fruits of his ambition, if you take him from the splendour of a great political career, if you close the doors of public life against him, if you condemn him to sterile failure, he who was made for triumph and success? Women are not meant to judge us but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission. Why should you scourge him with rods for a sin done in his youth, before he knew you, before he knew himself? A man's life is of more value than a woman's. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A women's life revolves around curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that man's life progresses. Don't make any terrible mistake, Lady Chiltern. A woman who can keep a man's love, and love him in return, has done all the world wants of women, or should want of them.
Oscar Wilde
The pure and simple truth is, the truth is never pure and simple.
Oscar Wilde
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Oscar Wilde
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.Vice and virtue are the artist’s materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feelings, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectators, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Oscar Wilde
He was a man of most subtle and refined intellect. A man of culture, charm, and distinction. One of the most intellectual men I ever met.""I prefer a gentlemanly fool any day. There is more to be said for stupidity than people imagine. Personally I have a great admiration for stupidity. It is a sort of fellow-feeling, I suppose.
Oscar Wilde
the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity, I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect - simply a confession of failure. a
Oscar Wilde
The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.
Oscar Wilde
Marriage is a matter for common sense.""But women who have common sense are so curiously plain, father, aren't they? Of course I only speak from heresay?""No woman, plain or pretty, has any common sense at all, sir. Common sense is the privilege of our sex.
Oscar Wilde
For his mourners will be outcast menAnd outcasts always mourn...
Oscar Wilde
Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.
Oscar Wilde
WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)
Tom Stoppard
She lives the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
Oscar Wilde
I will love you always, because you will always be worthy of love.
Oscar Wilde
I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only thing I know anything about.
Oscar Wilde
Indeed, as a rule, everybody turns out to be somebody else.
Oscar Wilde
Ah! that is the great thing in life, to live the truth.
Oscar Wilde
I don't want to earn a living, I want to live.
Oscar Wilde
Within this restless, hurried, modern worldWe took our hearts' full pleasure - You and I,And now the white sails of our ship are furled,And spent the lading of our argosy.Wherefore my cheeks before their time are wan,For very weeping is my gladness fled,Sorrow has paled my young mouth's vermilion,And Ruin draws the curtains of my bed.But all this crowded life has been to theeNo more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spellOf viols, or the music of the seaThat sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell.
Oscar Wilde
I have forgotten all about my school days. I have a vague impression that they were detestable.
Oscar Wilde
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.
Oscar Wilde
I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand.
Oscar Wilde
There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.
Oscar Wilde
Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast,
Oscar Wilde
this woman is a genius in the day time and a beauty at night
Oscar Wilde
Never mind what I say. I am always saying what I shouldn't say. In fact, I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.
Oscar Wilde
My doctor says I must not have any serious conversation after seven [o'clock]. It makes me talk in my sleep.
Oscar Wilde
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, that it is weakness that yields to temptation? I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one's life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not-there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, terrible courage. I had that courage.
Oscar Wilde
My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.
Oscar Wilde
Poor Aubrey: I hope he will get all right. He brought a strangely new personality to English art, and was a master in his way of fantastic grace, and the charm of the unreal. His muse had moods of terrible laughter. Behind his grotesques there seemed to lurk some curious philosophy…
Oscar Wilde
What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than begin talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.
Oscar Wilde
She lives in the poetry she cannot write.
Oscar Wilde
Anybody can have common sense, povided that they have no imagination
Oscar Wilde
. . . try as we may we cannot get behind things to the reality. And the terrible reason may be that there is no reality in things apart from their appearances.
Oscar Wilde
But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.
Oscar Wilde
Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!— and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection.
Oscar Wilde