Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that - but that's the only way one can stay married.
Plays are painful. But the very act of writing is a basic freedom denied some women. Some would call it a privilege. So what's a little pain?
Mix and knead together all the state business as you do for your sausages. To win the people, always cook them some savory that pleases them.
When the sins of our fathers visit us We do not have to play host. We can banish them with forgiveness As God, in his His Largeness and Laws.
I've been wanting to write a book about what goes into creating a novel, and the story behind 'A Passage to India' is especially interesting.
I'm in good shape. My cancer means I have lost a lot of organs and I'm a lot lighter. I have devoted myself to yoga and I'm doing handstands.
For this was the round of love: fear which leads on desire, tenderness and fury, and that brutal anguish which triumphantly follows pleasure.
The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements.
Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young
We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.
I've reached a new level of closeness with a new friend when I can make a joke at their expense. That's one of the great joys of life for me.
The moon was so young, so strange, even as a young girl who is dreaming and is afraid to tell her dreams; and it was shining only for itself.
Plays were really my last option. The reason I didn't write plays initially was because I thought theatre was the worst of all the art forms.
You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that's your bad luck.
I think a lot of philosophers get so absorbed and distracted from the real matters of the world that they get lost in irrelevant sub-details.
Satires and lampoons on particular people circulate more by giving copies in confidence to the friends of the parties, than by printing them.
Steal! to be sure they may; and, egad, serve your best thoughts as gypsies do stolen children,-disfigure them to make 'em pass for their own.
The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.
When an oath is taken ... the mind is more attentive; for it guards against two things, the reproach of friends and offence against the gods.
O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.
You must not on any account give me credit for being penetrating. I have impressed people that way before, and the result is always disaster.
They don't understand what it is to be awake, / To be living on several planes at once / Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.
They told me to take a streetcar named Desire and then transfer to one called Cemeteries and ride six blocks and get off at - Elysian Fields!
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
There are directors who desire to be artistic. It is pathetic to compare the seriousness of their aim with the absurdity of their attainment.
'Fall on Your Knees' is really a story about secrets and family, and the idea that there are some stories or truths that need to be expressed.
There are times in my 30 years in the theater that I have come perilously close to losing faith in the one form of action I have in this life.
Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn for ever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.
I write for myself and my goal is bringing that world and that experience of black Americans to life on the stage and giving it a space there.
The political world is a dark place. If you want to portray it accurately, authentically, you've got to turn out the lights from time to time.
Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.
You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
It is Mystery - the mystery any one man or woman can feel but not understand as the meaning of any event - or accident - in any life on earth.
The cancer in me became an awareness of the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of carelessness, the cancer of greed.
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing - to learn to live on earth as human beings.
The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.
We throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction.
The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.
It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.
The costliness of keeping friends does not lie in what one does for them, but in what one, out of consideration for them, refrains from doing.
Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.
It's a liberation to know that an act of spontaneous courage is yet possible in this world. An act that has something of unconditional beauty.
AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.
'Intimate Apparel' is a lyrical meditation on one woman's loneliness and desire. 'Fabulation' is a very fast-paced play of the MTV generation.
There's nothing people can't contrive to praise or condemn and find justification for doing so, according to their age and their inclinations.
How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age. Much wiser to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance.