Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.
Sometimes people carry to such perfection the mask they have assumed that in due course they actually become the person they seem.
Death doesn't affect the living because it has not happened yet. Death doesn't concern the dead because they have ceased to exist.
In my conscience I believe the baggage loves me, for she never speaks well of me herself, nor suffers any body else to rail at me.
Marriage is honourable, as you say; and if so, wherefore should Cuckoldom be a Discredit, being deriv'd from so honourable a Root?
I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality.
Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them.
People in hotels strike no roots. The French phrase for chronic hotel guests even says so; they are called dwellers sur la branche.
In 'Angels in America,' I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.
the present is the merest flicker between the long long time past and the things that haven't yet happened but most assuredly will.
I think about Marvin Gaye and 'Sexual Healing.' What a radical idea that sex was healing. I learned my politics through that music.
I have studied him - the wonderful man - and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ he must be called the saviour of humanity.
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
When an apparent miracle happened.it proved divine mission to the credulous, and proved a contract with the devil to the skeptical.
Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.
I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.
You have to watch out with my plays. They're like yeast. You think they're one thing, then all of a sudden subtext gets to working.
For the first time I could remember, I felt weak, woozy and stupid— like a human-being. Like a very small and helpless human-being.
You can read ten books and finally come across one detail, and it's like, "now everything else makes sense. Now I know where I am."
There's no American playwright after 1945 who wasn't profoundly affected - who didn't have their DNA changed by Tennessee Williams.
Man dies. Come from darkness, into darkness he returns, and is reabsorbed, without a trace left, into the illimitable void of time.
Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness. I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see I have been found out.
Being a model seems like a dream job - lots of new clothes, cocaine, dates with Leonardo DiCaprio. But that's just for lady models.
It's one of the great tragedies of our contemporary life in America, that families fall apart. Almost everybody has that in common.
Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and freedom as you can.
Theatre is, at its roots, some very brave people mutually consenting to a make believe world, with nothing but language to rest on.
The only man who knows just what he thinks at the present moment is the man who hasn't done any new thinking in the past ten years.
We are living now. We shall not live long. No one should tell us we shall live again. This is our little while. This is our chance.
Why should men love the Church? Why should they love her laws? She tells them of Life and Death, and of all that they would forget.
The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way- The Church can sleep and feed at once.
What on earth can you do on this earth but catch at whatever comes near you, with both your fingers, until your fingers are broken?
Heath Ledger's recent death, like that of River Phoenix, was handled with great care by the press. Anna Nicole Smith's not so much.
I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for.
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
The artist can within limits make what he likes of his life... It is only the artist, and maybe the criminal, who can make his own.
Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.
Of bird and prophet and his light shall lead On through the darkness to eventual light, To undiscovered wealth, to newer need . . .
I think age is really changing how I write and the themes that I connect with. But there are also things I'm really intrigued about.
It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.
Can anyone remember love? It's like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume.