Quotes by Playwrights - Page 38

In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. ... In the real world, all rests on perseverance.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

- Where is Polonius?- In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself.

William Shakespeare

Such indeed was her image, that neither could Shakespeare describe, nor Hogarth paint, nor Clive act, a fury in higher perfection.

Henry Fielding

What a piece of work is man!

William Shakespeare

By being rigid, you become temporary; by being flexible, you become permanent!

Mehmet Murat ildan

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

T.S Eliot

And a young prince must be prudent like that,giving freely while his father livesso that afterwards, in age when fighting startssteadfast companions will stand by himand hold the line.

Seamus Heaney

Oh Tigger, where are your manners?""I don’t know, but I bet they’re having more fun than I am.

A.A. Milne

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

Again, there were maidens who cherished the firm belief that he had come from the sea. Because within his breast could be heard the roaring of the sea. Because in the pupils of his eyes there lingered the mysterious and eternal horizon that the sea leaves as a keepsake deep in the eyes of all who are born at the seaside and forced to depart from it. Because his signs were sultry like the tidal breezes of full summer, fragrant with the smell of seaweed cast upon the shore.

Yukio Mishima

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

Jean Cocteau

When I imagine changing places with her I get the feeling I do on finishing a novel with a brick-wall happy ending---I mean the kind of ending when you never think any more about the characters.

Dodie Smith

Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lustLike diamonds we are cut with our own dust

John Webster

Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that it is the paradise for women.It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of it.

Oscar Wilde

If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.

Thornton Wilder

When good Americans die, they go to Paris.

Oscar Wilde

Almost always, things are exactly as they appear. People are continually looking at the painful or boring parts of life with the half-hidden expectation that there is more going on beneath the surface, some deeper meaning that will eventually be unveiled; we're waiting for the saving grace, the shocking reveal. But almost always things just are what they are, almost always there's no glittering one hidden under the dirt.

Ben H. Winters

I believe the way to write a good play is to convince yourself it is easy to do--then go ahead and do it with ease. Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan till the first draft is finished. A play is a pheonix and it dies a thousand deaths. Usually at night. In the morning it springs up again from its ashes and crows like a happy rooster. It is never as bad as you think, it is never as good. It is somewhere in between, and success or failure depends on which end of your emotional gamut concerning its value it approaches more closely. But it is much more likely to be good if you think it is wonderful while you are writing the first draft. An artist must believe in himself. Your belief is contagious. Others may say he is vain, but they are affected.

Tennessee Williams

What's done can't be undone.

William Shakespeare

But I'm a bad priest, you see. I know--from experience--how much beauty Satan carried down with him when he fell. Nobody ever said the fallen angels were the ugly ones. Oh, no, they were just as quick and light and . . .

Graham Greene

Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Oscar Wilde

If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions: he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

Graham Greene

Have you seena dog lick the hand that thrashed it?!

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Time and space are awash here.

Jerome Lawrence

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in a thought or afterwards in a recasting... It will come if it is there and if you will let it come.

Gertrude Stein

One more drink and I'll be under the host.

Mae West

They do not love, that do not show their love.

William Shakespeare

Small herbs have grace, great weeds to grow apace.

William Shakespeare

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair: Tonight the wife and children will be quiet At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

Seamus Heaney

schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff" (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate.

Arnold Bennett

Everyone listened to this amusing narrative with great interest, and the moment that Behemoth concluded it, they all shouted in unison: 'Lies!

Mikhail Bulgakov

It is rather exciting to write by moonlight.

Dodie Smith

Amongst the flowers you always feel yourself you are endlessly far away from all the dangers!

Mehmet Murat ildan

In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occasionally appear, like a ray of light piercing the clouds, a moment of joy. Perhaps you have entered the house and sat down before removing your boots. A friend has pressed a drink into your hands, and is telling you the latest news. You see from his face that he's glad you've come in; and you are glad too. Glad to be sitting down, glad of the warming glow of the dirnk, glad of your friend's furrowed brow and eager speech. For this moment, nothing more is required. It is in its way unimprovable. This is what I mean by the Great Enough.

William Nicholson

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.

Oscar Wilde

A limited mind will have a limited world!

Mehmet Murat ildan

They were all fitting into place, the jig-saw pieces. The odd strained shapes that I had tried to piece together with my fumbling fingers and they had never fitted. Frank's odd manner when I spoke about Rebecca. Beatrice and her rather diffident negative attitude. The silence that I had always taken for sympathy and regret was a silence born of shame and embarrassment. It seemed incredible to me now that I had never understood. I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great wall in front of them that hid the truth. This was what I had done. I had built up false pictures in my mind and sat before them. I had never had the courage to demand the truth. Had I made one step forward out of my own shyness Maxim would have told these things four months, five months ago.

Daphne du Maurier

I've known rivers:I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

Langston Hughes

He knows nothing he thinks he knows everything - that clearly points to a political career.

George Bernard Shaw

What day is it,?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.“My favorite day,” said Pooh.

A.A. Milne

If there were no thunder, men would have little fear of lightning.

Jules Verne

You and I may look at a banana and see a banana. If forced to come up with something more inventive to do with it, perhaps we'd mash it up, or maybe we'd dip it in chocolate, and say 'What a good boy am I.

Peter Sagal

Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore, should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were no sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive the day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.

William Shakespeare

There are men who put the weight of a coffin into their deliberations as they bargain for Cashmere shawls for their wives, as they go up the staircase of a theatre, or think of going to the Bouffons, or of setting up a carriage; who are murderers in thought when dear ones, with the irresistable charm of innocence, hold up childish foreheads to be kissed with a ‘Good-night, father!’ Hourly they meet the gaze of eyes they would fain close forever, eyes that still open each morning to the light. . . God alone knows the number of those who are parricides in thought

Honoré de Balzac

You know, Daddy, I think that the most necessary quality for any person to have imagination. It makes people able to put themselves in other people's places. It make them kind and sympathetic and understanding. It ought to be cultivated in children.

Jean Webster

I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.(Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.)Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.

Samuel Beckett

I am married to Beatrice Salkeld a painter. We have no children except me.

Brendan Behan

Doobie always wanted to see the badge. It was shiny, and he was eight.

Eoin Colfer

We have to keep company with supposedly bad characters if we are to survive and not succumb to mental atrophy. People of good character, so called, are the ones who end up boring us to death.

Thomas Bernhard

Art is the writer not having control, but the subject having control of the writer.

Paula Vogel

I love doubt in a woman. It's nearly as sexy as determination.

Irvine Welsh

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

God gave us memories that we might have roses in December.

James M. Barrie

MISS PRISMMemory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Oscar Wilde

My only policy is to profess evil and do good.

George Bernard Shaw

The best light which illuminates your path is your determination!

Mehmet Murat ildan

c.t“So, hunny, don’t waste your time trying to label or define me…’cause I’m not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago. I’m all of that and then some. And whereas I can’t live inside yesterday’s pain, I can’t live without it.

George C. Wolfe

HALE, with a tasty love of intellectual pursuit

Arthur Miller

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