Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
Our lives can only be lived forward and understood backwards. Living a life and understanding it occupy different dimensions.
You can't spend your life beating yourself up for something that happened yesterday. You die if you don't follow your desire.
I don't make judgments about my own work, and I don't analyze it; I just let it happen. That applies to everything I've done.
I find the whole Blairish idea more and more repugnant every day. 'New Labour': the term itself is so trashy. Kind of ersatz.
The sea possesses a power over one's moods that has the effect of a will. The sea can hypnotize. Nature in general can do so.
I'm really into the irony of writing vaguely radical plays that instantly win huge establishment awards. It's really amusing.
The faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception.
It is the timber of poetry that wears most surely, and there is no timber that has not strong roots among the clay and worms.
Laughter's the nearest we ever get, or should get, to sainthood. It's the state of grace that saves most of us from contempt.
There will be a quick rash of hairy American filth, but it shouldn't threaten the existence of decent, serious British filth.
I think it's disingenuous to believe that being born into a privileged world means you feel like you are having an easy time.
Many a happiness in life, a many a disaster, is due to chance alone; but the peace within us can never be governed by chance.
There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot.
Rest assured that there is nothing which wounds the heart of a noble man more deeply than the thought his honour is assailed.
My family moved around a lot, so I don't have any friends that I had all my life, but I did have annual trips back to Queens.
The gods give that man some profit to whom they are propitious. [Lat., Cui homini dii propitii sunt aliquid objiciunt lucri.]
I compared pooh-poohers of the movies to the myopics who used to holler, 'Get a horse!' when an early automobile exploded by.
I ne'er could any lustre see In eyes that would not look on me; I ne'er saw nectar on a lip But where my own did hope to sip.
Our ancestors are very good kind of folks; but they are the last people I should choose to have a visiting acquaintance with.
My usual route is, I do a play at South Coast Rep, then there's time between and I revise it, and then I take it to New York.
I think comedy's harder to pull off on the screen than on the stage, anyway. Tragedy is easier on the screen... oddly enough.
To write drama is to leave a can of Coke by the side of the road. Then, sit on that can of Coke. Where's the can of Coke now?
I saw that it was all over, put away in a box like a doll no longer cared for, the magical intimacy of our childhood together
Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.
There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.
The possibilities are infinite with new writing; every time you open a new script, there's no limit to what it might contain.
What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories.
I have always been convinced that if a woman once made up her mind to marry a man, nothing but instant flight could save him.
When he sacrifices himself man for a moment is greater than God, for how can God, infinite and omnipotent, sacrifice himself?
It's always difficult to make conversation with a drunk, and there's no denying it, the sober are at a disadvantage with him.
A novelist must preserve a childlike belief in the importance of things which common sense considers of no great consequence.
Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.
Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.
To be honest, if I was going to have any kind of fantasy, be it left-wing or otherwise, it wouldn't involve Margaret Thatcher.
Do not bandy words with your father, nor treat him as a dotard, nor reproach the old man, who has cherished you, with his age.
The camera has its own kind of consciousness; in the lens the Garden of Eden itself would become ever so slightly too perfect.
They tried to escape technology, to stay away from that and still have relationships with their fellow humans. Very difficult.
There's no idea in the world that is not contained by black life. I could write forever about the black experience in America.
I think that's the core of black aesthetics: the ability to improvise. That is what has enabled our [black people's] survival.
Forget narrative, backstory, characterisation, exposition, all of that. Just make the audience want to know what happens next.
You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'
In betting on races, there are two elements that are never lacking - hope as hope, and an incomplete recollection of the past.
Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf means who's afraid of the big bad wolf ... who's afraid of living life without false illusions.
First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.