Quotes by Playwrights - Page 73

The prince of darkness is a gentleman!
William Shakespeare
Irony is wasted on the stupid
Oscar Wilde
He disregarded everything, he gave everything to art. He tirelessly visited galleries, spent whole hours standing before the works of great masters, grasped and pursued a wondrous brush. He never finished anything without testing himself several times by these great teachers and reading wordless but eloquent advice for himself in their paintings.
Nikolai Gogol
A touch may not always be a love but love is always a touch!
Mehmet Murat ildan
A touch may not be always be a love but love is always a touch!
Mehmet Murat ildan
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.
Graham Greene
Because. Everything worth anything takes time.
Christy Hall
You are more ready and able to grasp at opportunity when your hands are empty.
Christy Hall
Lost in New York City. Not that I don't know where I am, but rather perplexed as to where I am going.
Christy Hall
New York is perfect. Just the way it is. In all its imperfection.
Christy Hall
A writing day is like any other day. Except I live in my pajamas, I forget to eat, and I suddenly look up, wondering when day turned into night.
Christy Hall
I just slept for fifteen hours straight. Yes, writing a musical is THAT exhausting!
Christy Hall
No writer need feel sorry for himself if he writes and enjoys the writing, even if he doesn’t get paid for it.
Irwin Shaw
My early attempts writing plays, which are very poetic, did not use the language that I work in now. I didn't recognize the poetry in everyday language of black America. I thought I had to change it to create art.
August Wilson
I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.
Graham Greene
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Seamus Heaney
Meggie Folchart: Having writer's block? Maybe I can help.Fenoglio: Oh yes, that's right. You want to be a writer, don't you?Meggie Folchart: You say that as if it's a bad thing.Fenoglio: Oh no, it's just a lonely thing. Sometimes the world you create on the page seems more friendly and alive than the world you actually live in.
David Lindsay-Abaire
The first thing you have to learn when you go into the arts is to learn to cope with rejection. If you can’t, you’re dead
Warren Adler
The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.
Thornton Wilder
I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.
W Somerset Maugham
She was made up of more, too. She was the books she read in the library. She was the flower in the brown bowl. Part of her life was made from the tree growing rankly in the yard. She was the bitter quarrels she had with her brother whom she loved dearly. she was Katie's secret, despairing weeping. She was the shame of her father staggering home drunk.She was all of these things and of something more that did not come from the Rommelys nor the Nolans, the reading, the observing, the living from day to day. It was something that had been born into her and her only - the something different from anyone else in the two families. It was what God or whatever is His equivalent puts into each soul that is given life - the one different thing such as that which makes no two fingerprints on the face of the earth alike.
Betty Smith
And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another.
Samuel Beckett
And I seemed to see myself ageing as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of ageing was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be.
Samuel Beckett
I wanted to protect my professorial dignity and not lay myself open to laughter from the Americans, who when they do laugh, laugh raucously
Jules Verne
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Oscar Wilde
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction.
Oscar Wilde
I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.
Robertson Davies
I thrice presented him a kingly crown. Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition?
William Shakespeare
Verily, I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow.
William Shakespeare
Ambition should be made from sterner stuff.
William Shakespeare
Frog in the mud is happier than the man, because it has no ambition to reach the stars!
Mehmet Murat ildan
That's what you got for being a servant of no ambition: a shrunken life, hung up like a gibbet as a warning to others.
Emma Donoghue
Nothing becomes some women more than the prick of ambition. Love, on the contrary, may make them very dull.
Françoise Sagan
Maybe that was the trouble. She got the first and biggest share of everything – first whack at the new clothes and the biggest part of any special treat. Hazel never had to grab for anything and she was soft.
Carson McCullers
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
Stefan Zweig
One of my objectives is learning more than is absolutely necessary.
Jules Verne
Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.
Stefan Zweig
His resolve is not to seem, but to be, the best.
Aeschylus
Every man of ambition has to fight his century with its own weapons. What this century worships is wealth. The God of this century is wealth. To succeed one must have wealth. At all costs one must have wealth.
Oscar Wilde
My second wife left me because she said I was too ambitious. She didn't realize that it is only the dying who are free from ambition. And they probably have the ambition to live. Some men disguise their ambition--that's all. I was in a position to help this young man my wife loved. He soon showed his ambition then. There are different types of ambition - that is all, and my wife found she preferred mine. Because it was limitless. They do not feel the infinite is an unworthy rival, but for a man to prefer the desk of an assistant manager - that is an insult.
Graham Greene
I have no spurTo prick the sides of my intent, but onlyVaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itselfAnd falls on the other.
William Shakespeare
She began stroking my ankles. I considered kicking her in the cunt.
Samuel Beckett
And who says you always have to understand things? You can like them without understanding them -- like 'em better sometimes.
Dodie Smith
I charge thee, fling away ambition. By that sin fell the angels.
William Shakespeare
For the salvation of his soul the Muslim digs a well. It would be a fine thing if each of us were to leave behind a school, or a well, or something of the sort, so that life would not pass by and retreat into eternity without a trace.
Anton Chekhov
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
Oscar Wilde
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.
Oscar Wilde
Pick a man, any man. That man there. See him. That man hatless. You know his opinion of the world. You can read it in his face, in his stance. Yet his complaint that a man’s life is no bargain masks the actual case with him. Which is that men will not do as he wishes them to. Have never done, never will do. That’s the way of things with him and his life is so balked about by difficulty and become so altered of its intended architecture that he is little more than a walking hovel hardly fit to house the human spirit at all. Can he say, such a man, that there is no malign thing set against him? That there is no power and no force and no cause? What manner of heretic could doubt agency and claimant alike? Can he believe that the wreckage of his existence is unentailed? No liens, no creditors? That gods of vengeance and of compassion alike lie sleeping in their crypt and whether our cries are for an accounting or for the destruction of the ledgers altogether they must evoke only the same silence and that it is this silence which will prevail?
Cormac McCarthy
This other man he could never see in his entirety but he seemed an artisan and a worker in metal. The judge enshadowed him where he crouched at his trade but he was a coldforger who worked with hammer and die, perhaps under some indictment and an exile from men's fires, hammering out like his own conjectural destiny all through the night of his becoming some coinage for a dawn that would not be. It is this false moneyer with his gravers and burins who seeks favor with the judge and he is at contriving from cold slag brute in the crucible a face that will pass, an image that will render this residual specie current in the markets where men barter. Of this is the judge judge and the night does not end.
Cormac McCarthy
So oft it chances in particular menThat for some vicious mole of nature inthem—As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty,Since nature cannot choose his origin),By the o'ergrowth of some complexion,Oft breaking down the pales and forts ofreason,Or by some habit that too much o'erleavensThe form of plausive manners—that thesemen,Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,Being nature’s livery or fortune’s star,Their virtues else (be they as pure as grace,As infinite as man may undergo)Shall in the general censure take corruptionFrom that particular fault. The dram of evilDoth all the noble substance of a doubtTo his own scandal.
William Shakespeare
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on... The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude.
Oscar Wilde
Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that's put to use more gold begets.
William Shakespeare
My thought is me: that's why I can't stop. I exist because I think...and I can't stop myself from thinking. At this very moment, it's frightful, if I exist, it is because I am horrified at existing. I am the one who pulls myself from the nothingness to which I aspire: the hatred, the disgust of existing, there are as many ways to make myself exist, to thrust myself into existence. Thoughts are born at the back of me, like sudden giddiness, I feel them being born behind my head...if I yield, they're going to come round in front of me, between my eyes, and I always yield, the thought grows and grows and there it is, immense, filling me completely and renewing my existence.
Jean-Paul Sartre
There is much that is strange, but nothing that surpasses man in strangeness
Sophocles
Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.
Josephine Tey
If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.
Jules Verne
Where men can't live gods fare no better.
Cormac McCarthy
A man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else's box of matches
Jeff Lindsay
Aures habent et non audient` - `They have ears but hear not
Jules Verne
Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs.
Euripides