Quotes by Playwrights - Page 20

A man's work reveals him. In social intercourse he gives you the surface that he wishes the world to accept, but in his book or his picture the real man delivers himself defenceless. No affectation of peculiarity can conceal a commonplace mind. No one can produce the most casual work without disclosing the innermost secrets of his soul.

W Somerset Maugham

My Salome is a mystic the sister of Salammbô a Saint Thérèse who worships the moon.

Oscar Wilde

There are three lessons I would write-Three words, as with a burning pen, In tracings of eternal light,Upon the heart of men.Have hope! though clouds environ round,And gladness hides her face in scorn,Put thou the shadow from thy brow,No night but hath its morn.Have love! not love alone for one, But man as man thy brother call,And scatter like the circling sun,Thy charities on all.

Friedrich Schiller

Be warned in time, James, and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood

Oscar Wilde

By thinking continuously your past or your future, you kill your today which is the only substantial part of your life!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Knock yourself out... Or rather, don't.

Eoin Colfer

Darwin got it all wrong, you see. Fitness has nothing to do with it. It's survival of the sickest. That's all.

Philip Ridley

Every nation needs a crystal clear mirror to see its stupidities, to see its hypocrisies, to see its faults and its evils! No nation is saint! Every nation’s history is full of primitiveness and barbarity, full of wars and murders! Let every nation sees its face very clearly! Let them face their faces so that in the future they may be something better!

Mehmet Murat ildan

Weaving spiders, come not here, Hence, you long legged spinners, hence! Beetles black, approach not here, worm nor snail, do no offense.

William Shakespeare

He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.

Stefan Zweig

Nature reacts not only to physical disease but also to moral weakness when the danger increases she gives us greater courage.

Johann von Goethe

I have found men who didn't know how to kiss. I've always found time to teach them.

Mae West

A loss of any kind is horrible. Not because it takes away, but because it makes you believe- in newspapers, in tomatoes, in empty whiskey bottles.

Anosh Irani

One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.

Robertson Davies

...the space which [books] occupied was itself an expectation.

Cormac McCarthy

There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance.

Oscar Wilde

...Who could refrain,tThat had a heart to love, and in that hearttCourage to make love known?

William Shakespeare

Please tell me the truth about yourself.

Diane Samuels

Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge.

Simon Armitage

There are fascinating possibilities in this situation. I'd get it down on paper if I were you.

Joe Orton

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politics stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

Peter Morgan

History can come in handy. If you were born yesterday, with no knowledge of the past, you might easily accept whatever the government tells you. But knowing a bit of history--while it would not absolutely prove the government was lying in a given instance--might make you skeptical, lead you to ask questions, make it more likely that you would find out the truth.

Howard Zinn

What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord?Or to the dreadful summit of the cliffThat beetles o'er his base into the sea,And there assume some other horrible formWhich might deprive your sovereignty of reasonAnd draw you into madness? Think of it.[The very place puts toys of desperation,Without more motive, into every brainThat looks so many fathoms to the seaAnd hears it roar beneath.]

William Shakespeare

How silly men were! Their part in procreation was so unimportant; it was the woman who carried the child through long months of uneasiness and bore it with pain, and yet a man because of his momentary connection made such preposterous claims. Why should that make any difference to him in his feelings towards the child?

W Somerset Maugham

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating: people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde

If all the year were playing holidays To sport would be as tedious as to work.

William Shakespeare

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.

Oscar Wilde

But what are kings, when regiment is gone,But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?- Edward II, 5.1

Christopher Marlowe

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

Oscar Wilde

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

I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.

Terence

Whether I resolve to fire, earth, water, air, Or all the elements by scruples, I know not, Nor greatly care. - Shoot. Shoot!Of all deaths, the violent death is best;For from ourselves it steals ourselves so fast,The pain, once apprehended, is quite past.

John Webster

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live. It is asking other people to live as one wishes to live.

Oscar Wilde

In the morning there is meaning, in the evening there is feeling.

Gertrude Stein

There is always a certain peace in being what one is in being that completely.

Ugo Betti

If you can be very impartial in analysing your own past, then you will have a much better future!

Mehmet Murat ildan

We do not believe until we want a thing and feel that we shall die if it is not granted to us and then we kneel and believe.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

If you want to be a good writer, internalize the good writers; absorb them; integrate with their souls; embrace their minds; mingle with their life stories; in short, merge with them, lose yourself in them!

Mehmet Murat ildan

To be as vehement as he is is to be almost non-committal.

John Osborne

When people like the path you walk and the style you walk in that path, they will start following you!

Mehmet Murat ildan

No longer mourn for me when I am deadThan you shall hear the surly sullen bellGive warning to the world that I am fledFrom this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell;Nay, if you read this line, remember notThe hand that writ it; for I love you so,That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,If thinking on me then would make you woe.

William Shakespeare

People up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.

Langston Hughes

Mystery is a genius teacher: It forces its students to think thoroughly and to ask many questions! The path of mystery gives you much more things than the path of known!

Mehmet Murat ildan

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

George Bernard Shaw

Time, as it grows old, teaches all things.

Aeschylus

She looked at me like I was stupid, the same look the girls in JC used to give me when I hadn’t heard of the latest boy band, or turned up at Zouk wearing unfashionable clothes.

Jeremy Tiang

Human war has been the most successful of all our cultural traditions.

Robert Ardrey

You look ridiculous if you danceYou look ridiculous if you don't danceSo you might as welldance.

Gertrude Stein

I have started a new blog W.A.R.(Writers Amongst Readers) for all those writing or reading books. Quotes, excerpts, comments from the world's greatest writers. See robinhawdonblog

Robin Hawdon

To look beautiful and innocent all the time, keep your heart beautiful and innocent all the time!

Mehmet Murat ildan

I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes, or cheap jewellry?

Graham Greene

And perhaps there is none, no morrow anymore, for one who has waited so long for it in vain. And perhaps he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes and the wrecks all look alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and unchanging calm. But at long intervals they close, with the gentle suddenness of flesh that tightens, often without anger, and closes on itself.

Samuel Beckett

Without pleasure man would live like a fool and soon die.

Pierre de Beaumarchais

She says it's really not very flattering to her that the women who fall in love with her husband are so uncommonly second-rate.

W Somerset Maugham

What's done cannot be undone.

William Shakespeare

The best slave is the one who thinks he is free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.

Stefan Zweig

The man with insight enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.

Johann von Goethe

Strange how potent cheap music is.

Noël Coward

There is no sinner like a young saint.

Aphra Behn

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