Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I just hate that gay role models are supposed to be just like straight people, as if even straight people are like that.
He gains wisdom in a happy way, who gains it by another's experience. [Lat., Feliciter sapit qui alieno periculo sapit.]
For I know that many good things have happened to many, when least expected; and that many hopes have been disappointed.
I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.
Revision, once well done, becomes a sort of automatic itch which you scratch in the next work without thinking about it.
After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
If you have done terrible things, you must endure terrible things; for thus the sacred light of injustice shines bright.
What men have seen they know; But what shall come hereafter No man before the event can see, Nor what end waits for him.
The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
The difference between being an elder statesman And posing successfully as an elder statesman Is practically negligible.
I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you.
I was so thrilled being a reporter, because it gave you the kind of access to people that you wouldn't ever get to meet.
To be frank: the translations that often sound bad in the mouths of the actors, these have often been done by linguists.
You are the plays you write. How on earth could you write them otherwise? They're projections of your own predilections.
The average American can get into the kingdom of heaven much more easily than he can get into the Boulevard St. Germain.
It must be that to govern a nation you need a specific talent and that this may very well exist without general ability.
I've been very lucky in everything, really - in my career and in finding someone to share my life with, and in not dying.
Life is just a short walk from the cradle to the grave - and it sure behooves us to be kind to one another along the way.
The world should not be organized to require heroines, and when one is required but fails to appear, we should not judge.
I been with strangers all day and they treated me like family. I come in here to family and you treat me like a stranger.
Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup And I'll not look for wine.
I started directing out of necessity, the first play I wrote in college because I didn't know anyone who could direct it.
You can't get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.
It is nearly 50 years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.
Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.
I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.
You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
Generally, the realm in which black playwrights have been allowed to achieve success has been social realism or musicals.
Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you?
The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.
Growing up in the Philippines, I loved all kinds of movies. We had a very healthy film industry there when I was a child.
Every time you go the way the audience expects, they'll think you're original. People laugh with pleasure at the obvious.
Maybe if I'd had more direct contact with death, I wouldn't find it so fascinating and I wouldn't write about it so much.
Curious, isn't it that "talking with the right people" means something so different from "talking with the right person"?
Family is just accident.... They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family, they just are.
on the whole the American theater, dominated by men, does not perceive women fighting for their lives as a central issue.
Nothing in the whole world is so athirst for beauty as the soul, nor is there anything to which beauty clings so readily.
To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.
There is no soul that does not respond to love, for the soul of man is a guest that has gone hungry these centuries back.
To find yourself jilted is a blow to your pride. Do your best to forget it and if you don't succeed, at least pretend to.
How easily a fathers tenderness is recalled, and how quickly a son's offenses vanish at the slightest word of repentance!
Love has both its gall and honey in abundance: it has sweetness to the taste, but it presents bitterness also to satiety.
As there are three of us come on purpose for the game, you won't be so cantankerous as to spoil the party by sitting out.
I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
Many are the things that man seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know what lies in the hand of time to come?