Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We need theatre that is contemporary, lively and relevant, and the only way to do that is to take care of our playwrights and produce their plays.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
You learn more quickly under the guidance of experienced teachers. You waste a lot of time going down blind alleys if you have no one to lead you.
Life wouldn’t be worth living if I worried over the future as well as the present. When things are at their worst I find something always happens.
I've met so many people, often the scum of the earth, and found them, you know, quite decent. I am an uncomfortable stranger to moral indignation.
Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.
Of course I am aware that there is a level of sexism in any large institution, but I find, in television and film, most of the producers are women.
I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.
I think all minority audiences watch movies with hope. They hope they will see what they want to see. That's why nobody really sees the same movie.
There is a kind of perverse unity forming among us, born, I think, of the discontent of all classes of people with the endless frustration of life.
Life is not so idiotically mathematical that only the big eat the small; it is just as common for a bee to kill a lion or at least to drive it mad.
Part of what our problem as blacks in America is that we don't claim that. Partly, you see, because of the linguistic environment in which we live.
When you have both parties who will not find ways to compromise, who won't meet in the middle, you have paralysis. It's the perversion of idealism.
I believe in irony. And if V-Day has taught me anything, it's that if you go out with artistic, outrageous irony and humor, people are drawn to it.
I recognize limitations in the sense that I've read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare . . . Aside from that I don't think of limiting myself.
I did not find him absurd. I saw he was kind, that he was on the verge of real love. I thought it would be nice for me to be in love with him, too.
I remember how I would wait for a play idea. I wasted a tremendous amount of time. I didn't realize that ideas could be made into movies or novels.
When men die of disease they are said to die from natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do) the doctor gets the credit of curing them.
A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.
When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.
You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.
Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.
I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.
...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.
There is something so indescribably sweet and satisfying in the knowledge that a husband or wife has forgiven the other freely, and from the heart.
…a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back.
Humour breaks down boundaries, it topples our self-importance, it connects people, and because it engages and entertains, it ultimately enlightens.
It is right and natural that generous minds while in the twenties should think the books which try to reform the world's wrong the greatest of all.
I live in the Village, and the way it's been, people sort of drop in on me and my husband. My husband is Robert Nemiroff, and he, too, is a writer.
When you've got good actors, they're going to come up with good stuff, but you're never quite sure how the dynamics are going to work between them.
The fact that ticket prices are way too expensive, and there's only one bunch of people going to see Broadway shows, is something I've never liked.
'Beauty Queen' will always be a favourite because I think it's a really tight play, and when it's done right, there is a sadness to it that I love.
You do well to have visions of a better life than of every day, but it is the life of every day from which the elements of a better life must come.
Hollywood is a place where some people lie on the beach and look up at the stars, whereas other people lie on the stars and look down at the beach.
I'm a firm believer that language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives and other people's lives.
I think art is a healing force, and if we give in to the joy that can be found in art, then we are able to sustain ourselves in spite of ourselves.
In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.
Now I've laid me down to die I pray my neighbors not to pry Too deeply into sins that I Not only cannot here deny But much enjoyed as life flew by.
What was good was that I had friends who were actors and in theatre who were really good, because I think my strengths were visual, like pictorial.
I've heard writers talk about "discovering a voice," but for me that wasn't a problem. There were so many voices that I didn't know where to start.
When I was a kid, we didn't have a TV until the late '50s, but I can remember watching Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, Steve McQueen, and 'Gunsmoke.'
There is such solace in the mere sight of water. It clothes us delicately in its blowing salt and scent, gossamer items that medicate the poor soul
The facts of another's life do not illumine. Only when we know the heart can we know that life. Only the feeling that made the days can light them.
I know I fib a good deal. After all, a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion, but when a thing is important I tell the truth. - Blanche Scene II
I sincerely believe that for the New York theatre to remain relevant, all our major producing institutions should be presenting new American plays.
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.