Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you see the way things deteriorate before your very eyes. Everything running down hill. It's kind of silly to even think about youth.
To create something beautiful about despair or out of a feeling of despair is for me the most hopeful life affirming thing a person can do
Questions of absolute good and evil are much better not opened to public debate these days, when so few people are sure of their absolutes
And as you walk yr road, as you live yr life, RELISH THE ROAD. And relish the fact that the road of yr life will probably be a windy road.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.
Yeats was the greatest poet of our times . . . certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language.
I have spent my whole life working in the theater, and most of the people I know have done the same. And we are pretty interesting people.
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
Now the answer ... is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.
I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'
He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
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.
It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience.
Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
One has always got to be terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima donnas, not to let the distortions occur.
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.
The great thing about a short story is that it doesn't have to trawl through someone's whole life; it can come in glancingly from the side.
A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves.
If I go on talking and talking...and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don't forget, but you bear it better.
People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them
In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.
The function of comedy is to dispelunconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysisright on to it.
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it
The whole brunt of the media and the government is to encourage people to be highly competitive and totally selfish and uncaring of others.
The likelihood of one individual being right increases in direct proportion to the intensity to which others are trying to prove him wrong.
NORA: I must stand on my own two feet if I'm to get to know myself and the world outside. That's why I can't stay here with you any longer.
Helmer: "Before all else you are a wife and a mother." Nora: "That I no longer believe. I believe that before all else I am a human being."
Oh, life would be all right if we didn't have to put up with these damned creditors who keep pestering us with the demands of their ideals.
On our way home we were waiting for the bus when a very fat, pompous-looking woman reeled out of a pub shouting, "Melancholia? Ad nauseam."
James Joyce wrote the definitive work about Dublin while he was living in Switzerland. We're all where we come from. We all have our roots.
People go to see beautiful paintings to see how much they cost. Wow. The practical value is that it shows you what the human spirit can do.
I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age - unless you're an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.
There's a few people who I've accumulated over the years who I really trust to show a first cut to and to be helpful rather than unhelpful.
I'm always really interested in different environments and how they affect people's lives and what it would be like to live somewhere else.
Sentiment, crystallized, grows into sentimentality. It lost all spontaneity, which was the essence of feeling. It was dated--old-fashioned.
Also, everyone thinks they know Candide - you hear people described as 'Panglossian'. So if Candide appears on a poster, it feels familiar.
Remember that happiness is as contagious as gloom. It should be the first duty of those who are happy to let others know of their gladness.
Wisdom requires no form; her beauty must vary, as varies the beauty of flame. She is no motionless goddess, for ever couched on her throne.
I have done what I could do in life, and if I could not do better, I did not deserve it. In vain I have tried to step beyond what bound me.
And on this earth of ours there are but few souls that can withstand the dominion of the soul that has suffered itself to become beautiful.
There is no reward so delightful, no pleasure so exquisite, as having one's work known and acclaimed by those whose applause confers honor.
Goldie Hawn is funny, sexy, beautiful, talented, intelligent, warm, and consistently sunny. Other than that, she doesn't impress me at all.
Nathan Lane always wanted to play Oscar. When he came in the first day, he already knew his lines. He said he'd known them since he was 18.
The air is like a draught of wine. The undertaker cleans his sign, The Hull express goes off the line, When it's raspberry time in Runcorn.
Women have many faults, but the worst of them all is that they are too pleased with themselves and take too little pains to please the men.
Many a wretch has rid on a hurdle who has done less mischief than utterers of forged tales, coiners of scandal, and clippers of reputation.
The dog barking at you from behind his master's fence acts for a motive indistinguishable from that of his master when the fence was built.