Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Smiles are the language of love.
I believe love opens people up.
No one but a fool is always right.
Children always turn to the light.
In oratory the will must predominate.
Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.
The future of American film lies on television.
Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.
To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.
When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.
Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.
If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.
The ultimate tendency of civilization is towards barbarism.
Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.
In those days, the early 1980s, TV and film were interchangeable.
An inability to handle language is not the same thing as stupidity.
Insofar as I'm good at directing, it's because I've become a writer.
The actual business of writing dialogue is not thought of as a craft.
Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.
Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.
The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.
In the '70s, terrorism was much more serious, in that many more people got killed.
I actually think love changes everything. I think it's the only thing worth having.
I never used to kill characters, because I thought killing characters was cheating.
The majority don't like me before the curtain goes up, and I always have to win them.
Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.
I'm trying to write something in which you know that it's all about sex but you never see any.
Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.
The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.
Via Dolorosa is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and Ill never act again.
The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.
As human beings, we are all not conducting just one narrative but many narratives all at the same time.
Surely our job while we're here on Earth is to learn about the world, not to create parallel universes.
'Via Dolorosa' is the only thing I have ever acted in my life, professionally, and I'll never act again.
The one thing that Via Dolorosa has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.
The one thing that 'Via Dolorosa' has is no opinions. To me, curiosity is 50 times as valuable as opinion.
One of the depressing things in England is the total orthodoxy: the law is handed down from Downing Street.
Politics is just a function of business now, just a tributary of the great entrepreneurial capitalist system.
As you write plays, you discover what you believe. And until you know what you believe, you can't write a play.
I fell into writing plays by accident. But the reason I write plays is that it's the only thing I'm any good at.
You cant get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.
I have a very, very good relationship with 10 percent of the audience. The only purpose of art is intimacy. That's the only point.
I'm vey bad at marshaling arguments. I can't, at a dinner party, explain why I'm a socialist and why others should be socialists as well.
Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.
Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.
One of the things I find about getting older is that I seem to get louder, more voluble; that I constantly have to walk around repressing my vitality.
It's inevitable that you will die, so the only question is when. The great thrillers are the moments that play and tease with the question, "When will it be?"
[David] Mamet's the writer I admire most but he's way off from when he tries to talk about what the moral appeal of liberal thought is. His heart is not in it.
