Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.
I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm.
I can't turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.
Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.
When I was on dialysis, I willed myself to do 'On the Town.' It accesses my most childlike, joyful love of theater.
Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.
Nobody can put a character on paper without - at any rate in part and at times - sitting as a model for it himself.
Do you know what we are those of us who count as pillars of society? We are society's tools, neither more nor less.
Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
Gloucester's not some chi-chi tourist town. It's a working-class seaport: a no-kidding-around down-and-dirty place.
And so as much as I can, I care about her, dear Deborah. It's probably not love, but I would rather she were happy.
Thou shalt not steal the shekels of thine audience with a play which doth not let them know what the hell goeth on.
How much of your life can you account for? My life is a collage of unaccounted for brush strokes; I am all random”.
I fell in love with Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone and Hitchcock and Orson Welles and John Huston.
I never deliberately set out to shock, but when people don't walk out of my plays I think there is something wrong.
dear god, whose name i do not know. thank you for my life. i forgot... how BIG... thank you. thank you for my life.
I still think that if the human race, or even one nation, could only get right about its God the rest would follow.
Bread without love is like grass without salt -- the stomach may be filled, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.
Esteem must be founded on some sort of preference. Bestow it on everybody and it ceases to have any meaning at all.
At twelve noon, The natives swoon And no further work is doneBut mad dogs and Englishmen, Go out in the midday sun.
You little know what a ticklish thing it is to go to law. [Lat., Nescis tu quam meticulosa res sit ire ad judicem.]
I had two experiences with very close friends of mine who experienced aphasia, the loss of language. It shocked me.
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
It is planned speeches that contain lies or dissimulations, not what you blurt out so spontaneously in one instant.
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.
What is the victory of a cat on a hot tin roof? - I wish I knew... Just staying on it, I guess, as long as she can.
I like to surprise myself. I've always been attracted to projects where I don't know how they're going to turn out.
I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.
I'd sooner be smashed into a mangled pulp by a bus when we cross the street than look forward to a life like yours.
A woman will always sacrifice herself if you give her the opportunity. It is her favourite form of self indulgence.
Conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.
Now hell and heaven grapple on our backs and all our old pretense is ripped away. Aye, and God's icy wind will blow.
You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and for love it will soon itself return.
What an occupation! To sit and flay your fellow men and then offer their skins for sale and expect them to buy them.
You get to the point where your demons, which are terrifying, get smaller and smaller and you get bigger and bigger.
I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.
There is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.
The act of writing is an act of optimism. You would not take the trouble to do it if you felt that it didn't matter.
Our lives are awkward and fragile and we have only one thing to keep us sane: pity, and the man without pity is mad.
Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
I am sure there is Magic in everything, only we have not sense enough to get hold of it and make it do things for us
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.
Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.