Quotes by Playwrights - Page 63

If you have a very strong will to travel, the road will suddenly appear before you!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If you have a very strong will to travel, the road will suddenly appear before!
Mehmet Murat ildan
If and when our civilization comes to ruin, the destructive agent will be Science; man's knowledge of science, applied to warfare, meaning slaughter not only of human bodies, but of human institutions, of all we have created through the centuries.
Cicely Hamilton
In the middle of nowhere, an old wooden bridge is a golden bridge!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb.
Oscar Wilde
Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.
William Shakespeare
If one proceeds philosophically before proceeding poetically, and this is central to the philosopher, pleasure is crushed, But if one begins by having pleasure, it is like knowing how to swim: one never forgets it [Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans Elizabeth Lowe & Earl Fitz, Foreword by Hélène Cixous trans Verena Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989].
Hélène Cixous
The pain is kind of challenge your mind presents - will you learn how to focus and move past boredom, or like a child will you succumb to the need for immediate pleasure and distraction?
Robert Greene
LADY BRACKNELLI had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now.ALGERNONI hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief.
Oscar Wilde
I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience.’‘It seems to me an awfully selfish way of looking at things,’ said Philip.‘But are you under the impression that men ever do anything except for selfish reasons?’‘Yes.’‘It is impossible that they should. You will find as you grow older that the first thing needful to make the world a tolerable place to live in is to recognise the inevitable selfishness of humanity. You demand unselfishness from others, which is a preposterous claim that they should sacrifice their desires to yours. Why should they? When you are reconciled to the fact that each is for himself in the world you will ask less from your fellows. They will not disappoint you, and you will look upon them more charitably. Men seek but one thing in life—their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
Men seek but one thing in life - their pleasure.
W Somerset Maugham
JACKYour duty as a gentleman calls you back. ALGERNONMy duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.
Oscar Wilde
In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way.I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant.
Oscar Wilde
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
Oscar Wilde
He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall.
Christopher Marlowe
The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.
Eve Ensler
...a writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.
Anton Chekhov
I disagree with the advice of 'write about what you know.' Write about what you need to know, in an effort to understand.
Donald Windham
I will continue to write moral stories in rhymed couplets. But I should be thrice a fool if I did it for aught but my own entertainment.
W Somerset Maugham
Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it.
Ben H. Winters
A watched pot never boils." It's the same with success. So? Throw that burner on HIGH and just keep on cooking. Dinner will be ready soon.
Christy Hall
I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.
Robertson Davies
A major character has to come somehow out of the unconscious.
Graham Greene
A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from.
Arthur Miller
Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like all-embracing compassion.
Arnold Bennett
Your story is not a picture of life; it lacks the elements of truth. And why? Simply because you run straight on to the end; because you do not analyze. Your heroes do this thing or that from this or that motive, which you assign without ever a thought of dissecting their mental and moral natures. Our feelings, you must remember, are far more complex than all that. In real life every act is theresultant of a hundred thoughts that come and go, and theseyou must study, each by itself, if you would create a livingcharacter. 'But,' you will say, 'in order to note these fleetingthoughts one must know them, must be able to follow them in their capricious meanderings.You have simply to make use of hypnotism, electrical or human, which gives one a two-fold being, setting free the witness-personality so that it may see, understand, and remember the reasons which determine the personality that acts.
Jules Verne
There are two moments worthwhile in writing, the one when you start and the other when you throw it in the waste-paper basket.
Samuel Beckett
Now there was great rejoicing at the rumor of Alderic's quest, for all folk knew that he was a cautious man, and they deemed that he would succeed and enrich the world, and they rubbed their hands in the cities at the thought of largesse; and there was joy among all men in Alderic's country, except perchance among the lenders of money, who feared they would soon be paid. And there was rejoicing also because men hoped that when the Gibbelins were robbed of their hoard, they would shatter their high-built bridge and break the golden chains that bound them to the world, and drift back, they and their tower, to the moon, from which they had come and to which they rightly belonged. There was little love for the Gibbelins, though all men envied their hoard.("The Hoard Of The Gibbelins")
Lord Dunsany
Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.
Lillian Hellman
Those that much covet are with gain so fond,For what they have not, that which they possessThey scatter and unloose it from their bond,And so, by hoping more, they have but less;Or, gaining more, the profit of excessIs but to surfeit, and such griefs sustain,That they prove bankrupt in this poor-rich gain.
William Shakespeare
What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week?Or sells eternity to get a toy?For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown,Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?
William Shakespeare
To torment and tantalize oneself with hopes of possible fortune is so sweet, so thrilling!
Anton Chekhov
She had always been comforted by confectionery
Sue Townsend
I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thyeyes—and moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.
William Shakespeare
We flew back home like swallows. 'Is it happiness that makes us so light?' Agathe asked.
Honoré de Balzac
Astride of a grave and a difficult birth.Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.We have time to grow old.The air is full of our cries.But habit is a great deadener.At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing.Let him sleep on.
Samuel Beckett
I often think about this, that is, I imagine to myself that here is Vera, dead, totally motionless, lying on the table, in a coffin... and I too, of course can no longer live. But for some reason this gives me pleasure, a terrible amount of pleasure to imagine so the one I love: earlier I imagined grandmother and then my fiance in this manner, even my favorite animals, Sparky our cat with the fiery bursts of red on his gray-black fur.("Thirty-Three Abominations")
Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal
In this world, people always find a way of doing what they want
Nikolai Gogol
Graveyards exist because death exists? No! Graveyards exist because we want to know precisely the place of our dead!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The dead will not die completely till the day they are remembered by no one!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You cannot do anything good for a dead man! Whatever goodness you want to do for him, do it when he is alive!
Mehmet Murat ildan
I felt dead and sick inside.
Susan Hill
CHORUS:You that live in my ancestral Thebes, behold this Oedipus,- him who knew the famous riddles and was a man most masterful; not a citizen who did not look with envy on his lot- see him now and see the breakers of misfortune swallow him!Look upon that last day always. Count no mortal happy till he has passed the final limit of his life secure from pain.
Sophocles
TEIRESIAS:I tell you, king, this man, this murderer(whom you have long declared you are in search of,indicting him in threatening proclamationas murderer of Laius)- he is here.In name he is a stranger among citizensbut soon he will be shown to be a citizentrue native Theban, and he'll have no joyof the discovery: blindness for sightand beggary for riches his exchange,he shall go journeying to a foreign countrytapping his way before him with a stick.He shall be proved father and brother bothto his own children in his house; to herthat gave him birth, a son and husband both;a fellow sower in his father's bedwith that same father that he murdered.Go within, reckon that out, and if you find memistaken, say I have no skill in prophecy.
Sophocles
OEDIPUS: Upon the murderer I invoke this curse-whether he is one man and all unknown, or one of many- may he wear out his life in misery to miserable doom! If with my knowledge he lives at my hearthI pray that I myself may feel my curse. On you I lay my charge to fulfill all this for me, for the God, and for this land of ours destroyed and blighted, by the God forsaken.
Sophocles
Comedies are fit for common wits: But to present a kingly troop withal, Give me a stately-written tra
Thomas Kyd
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so. Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
William Shakespeare
The only thing you've got in this world is what you can sell.
Arthur Miller
So our virtuesLie in the interpretation of the time:And power, unto itself most commendable,Hath not a tomb so evident as a chairTo extol what it hath done.One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail.
William Shakespeare
The tragedy of life is that sometimes we get what we want.
W Somerset Maugham
A tragedy can catch us any time possible; for this very reason, we must catch the life any time possible!
Mehmet Murat ildan
But I had deliberately acquired the habit of closing my eyes even to such obvious assumptions, just as though I did not want to miss a single opportunity for tormenting myself. This is a trite device, often adopted by persons who, cut off from all other means of escape, retreat into the safe haven of regarding themselves as objects of tragedy.
Yukio Mishima
If e'er again I meet him beard to beard, he's mine or I am his.
William Shakespeare
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty, beyond waht can be valued, rich or rare; no less than life, with grace, health, beauty, honor; as much as child e'er loved, or father found; a love that makes breath poor, and speech unable; beyond all manner of so much I love you.
William Shakespeare
I profess myself an enemy to all other joys, which the most precious square of sense possesses, and find I am alone felicitate in your dear highness love.
William Shakespeare
How beautiful the tragic seems when it is beneath a mask, but when it appears so nakedly before me and... when I am so forcibly implicated... I don't know whether I care for it so much. Somehow or other it is as though I were torturing myself.("Thirty-Three Abominations")
Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal
Had he not resembled My father as he slept I had done't!" Macbeth
William Shakespeare
How now! Here's the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Lady Macbeth
William Shakespeare
Unsex me here and fill me from crown to toe full of direst cruelty That no compunctious visitings of nature Shake my fell purpose." Macbeth
William Shakespeare
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
William Shakespeare