Quotes by Playwrights - Page 72

You are the actor. Your body brings in something, call it presence, and it happens by degrees. Arms, chest, haunches and thighs, calves and feet. The body, firing synapses, in between and in the gray matter. On and off. The billions of cells, the body mechanisms, the busy regulating, the adjusting, the retinas contracting and expanding, body secreting, beating, moving, breathing and pulsing. Your being registers here. Swallow. Inhale. Open mouth to press air out to touch the flesh in the throat to make sound. You are the actor. A thing of flesh and feeling. Perfect because you aren't.
Richard Maxwell
There is a deeper reason why the café was so precious to this town. And this deeper reason has to do with a certain pride that had not hitherto been known in these parts. To understand this new pride the cheapness of human life must be kept in mind. There were always plenty of people clustered around a mill – but it was seldom that every family had enough meal, garments, and fat back to go the rounds. Life could become one long dim scramble just to get the things needed to keep alive. And the confusing point is this: All useful things have a price, and are bought only with money, as that is the way the world is run. You know without having to reason about it the price of a bale of cotton, or a quart of molasses. But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all. Often after you have sweated and tried and things are not better for you, there comes a feeling deep down in the soul that you are not worth much.
Carson McCullers
Well people are just one species too, aren't they. And it's never stopped them fighting with each other; all the same species and think of all the excuses for war they've used! It hasn't had to be about space to live in, it's been about power, prestige, influence, fame, resources and I don't know what else!
Karel Čapek
Malicious men may die, but malice never.
Molière
Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion.
Grant Morrison
... when I see kings lying by those who deposed them,... or holy men that divided the world with their contests and disputes, I reflect with sorrow and astonishment on the little competitions, factions, and debates of mankind.
Joseph Addison
He'd have improved if you'd not givenHim a mere glimmer of the light in heaven;He calls it Reason, and it has only increasedHis power to be beastlier than a beast.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man, I can assure you, is a nasty creature.
Molière
Shall we their fond pageant see?Lord, what fools these mortals be!
William Shakespeare
Wherever there is a religious regime, over there there is ignorance, misery and absurdity! No religious state can ever elevate its own people! Sooner or later, the primitiveness of the religious administrations and the irrationality of the religious rules will cause a great collapse of those countries! The downfall is inevitable!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Some countries and some people are so primitively religious and so underdeveloped that they don’t need a time machine to go back to the past; they are already in there, in the very distant and dark past!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Gone is the trust to be placed in oaths; I cannot understand if the gods you swore by then no longer rule, or men live by new standards of what is right.
Euripides
He was religious, but had refrained from allowing his religious ideals to be obscured by a god.
Henning Mankell
The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.
William Shakespeare
If you keep fighting with yourself, you will have less energy to fight with life!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Your writing should be filled with simple complexities and complex simplicities. Because that is life.
Christy Hall
You know you are a writer when characters inside your brain keep demanding, 'This is my story! Now tell it or I will never leave you alone!
Christy Hall
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
William Trevor
I try to write a certain amount each day, five days a week. A rule sometimes broken is better than no rule.
Herman Wouk
And what has been so awful in your life that you have to write about it?” Mrs Lincoln, a definite gall bladder, persevered.
Larry Kramer
Live inside your stories, yes, but do not hide behind them.
Christy Hall
Eleven pages— this is a letter! Have courage. I'm going to stop.
Jean Webster
I came up with a pen and tablet hoping to write an immortal short story, but I've been having a dreadful time with my heroine— I CAN'T make her behave as I want her to behave; so I've abandoned her for the moment, and am writing to you.
Jean Webster
I saw a street car conductor today with one brown eye and one blue. Wouldn't he make a nice villain for a detective story?
Jean Webster
It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.
Dodie Smith
You write a hit play the same way you write a flop
William Saroyan
His whole being, his whole life was awakened in one instant, as if youth returned to him, as if the extinguished sparks of talent blazed up again. The blindfold suddenly fell from his eyes. God! to ruin the best years of his youth so mercilessly; to destroy, to extinguish the spark of fire that had perhaps flickered in his breast, that perhaps would have developed by now into greatness and beauty, that perhaps would also have elicited tears of amazement and gratitude!
Nikolai Gogol
What are men? Children who doubt.
Derek Walcott
He tried to read her heart in her handclasp but he knew nothing.
Cormac McCarthy
I believe in saints as I believe in sanctity. I believe in miracles as I believe in God, who can suspend the laws of His own making. But I believe, too, that the hand of God writes plainly and simply, for all men of good will to read. I am doubtful of His presence in confusion and conflicting voices.
Morris West
Doubt in love is the Devil in the paradise!
Mehmet Murat ildan
You can't create an ocean with a single drop. But you can create an ocean of suspicion with a single drop of doubt.
Mehmet Murat ildan
Our doubts are traitors, and make us loose the good that we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
INDECISION NOW!' isn’t a battle cry that’s going to rouse anybody’s blood. But I sometimes wonder if it isn’t the sanest one.
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low
There is nothing worse than certainty. Doubt makes us weak. That is why it’s so important. I’ve wasted too much of my life trying to be powerful.
Phillip Andrew Bennett Low
You want more light in your house? Enlarge your windows! You want more truth in your life? Doubt everything!
Mehmet Murat ildan
Only the dull don’t doubt!
Mehmet Murat ildan
...The less I think of it the more certain I am.
Samuel Beckett
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
Doubt thou the stars are fire Doubt thou the sun doth moveDoubt truth to be a liar But never doubt I love
William Shakespeare
You are not Dostoevsky,' said the woman...'You never can tell...' he answered.'Dostoevsky is dead,' the woman said, a bit uncertainly.'I protest!' he said with heat, 'Dostoevsky is immortal!
Mikhail Bulgakov
If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
T.S Eliot
The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.
Molière
You're worse than decent. You're virtuous.
Eugene O'Neill
You cut life to pieces with your epigrams.
Oscar Wilde
Acting is such a desperately futile profession anyway. Playing out the lives of other men. Knowing of their failures and successes long before they ever do. Living, suffering, murdering, dying … all in the space of three hours. Sometimes only two. And in such a confined little area. And over and over again every night. Can you imagine anything more perfectly stupid? Squeezing a whole existence into a measly evening’s entertainment on the stage? And not only that – in the middle of it all – pausing for an intermission. It makes one’s own life seem unbearably preposterous, doesn’t it?
Morris Panych
...You know, one good apple can spoil the rest,” Colonel Korn concluded with conscious irony.
Joseph Heller
General Peckem even recommends that we send our men into combat in full-dress uniform so they'll make a good impression on the enemy when they're shot down".
Joseph Heller
Doakes had a first name! It was Albert - had anyone ever really called him that? Unthinkable. I had assumed his name was Sergeant.
Jeff Lindsay
VLADIMIR: Moron!ESTRAGON: Vermin!VLADIMIR: Abortion!ESTRAGON: Morpion!VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat!ESTRAGON: Curate!VLADIMIR: C
Samuel Beckett
I hardly think that any Socialist, nowadays, would seriously propose that an inspector should call every morning at each house to see that each citizen rose up and did manual labour for eight hours.
Oscar Wilde
Irony is a gift of the gods, the most subtle of all the modes of speech. It is an armour and a weapon; it is a philosophy and a perpetual entertainment; it is food for the hungry of wit and drink to those thirsting for laughter...
W Somerset Maugham
I've often heard it said, a preacherMight learn, with a comedian for a teacher.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt.
George Bernard Shaw
There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I'd get it down on paper if I were you.
Joe Orton
There is no greater cruelty than a genius stumbling over something idiotic.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike.
William Shakespeare
I'm not a slave, man. I just gotta sign out, say where I'm going, what time I'll be back and then I gotta sign back in.
Ben H. Winters
Now it turns out that a few broadsheet film critics in Britain do indeed belong to a category of people who would have resisted Hitler when he came to power. So the great shame is, clearly film critics should have been running Austria at the time, because Hitler would have represented no problem to them at all. [The Guardian's] Peter Bradshaw would have known exactly what to do, and he would not have been remotely fallible to any Nazi who threatened his life. No, he would have died in heroic acts of individual resistance. So it's a privilege to live among people who enjoy such moral certainty.
David Hare
What is all this? Get him out of here, devil take me!” And that one, imagine, smiles and says: “Devil take you? That, in fact, can be done!” And—bang!
Mikhail Bulgakov