Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I happen to think we’ve set our ideal on the wrong objects; I happen to think that the greatest ideal man can set before himself is self-perfection.
Let us be very strange and well-bred:Let us be as strange as if we had been married a great while;And as well-bred as if we were not married at all.
She likes herself, yet others hates, For that which in herself she prizes; And while she laughs at them, forgets She is the thing that she despises.
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.
Trying to be a socialist and a libertarian is obviously a very difficult balancing act, which nobody has pulled off too successfully in this century.
I am sick of the disparity between things as they are and as they should be. I'm tired.I'm tired of the truth and I'm tired of lying about the truth.
To a certain extent I imagine a play is completely finished in my mind - in my case, at any rate - without my knowing it, before I sit down to write.
I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.
If women ran Hollywood, 'The Hollywood Reporter' would have a 'Men in Entertainment' issue every year, and those jerks would have to write something.
For all that being a parent is normal statistically, it's not normal psychologically. It produces some of the most extreme emotions you'll ever have.
The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us. When the world seems familiar, when one has got used to existence, one has become an adult.
I'm a nomad. I have a place in New York in the Flatiron District, and I have a place in Paris in Ile Saint-Louis, and I spend a lot of time in Congo.
One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever.
When man, Apollo man, rockets into space, it isn't in order to find his brother, I'm quite sure of that. It's to confirm that he hasn't any brothers.
A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.
The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.
I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.
Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.
A fascinating breed, Old Etonians. Impeccable in their social skills and very portable - you can put them anywhere, and they are absolutely charming.
Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples.
Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon The author of Lear remains unshaken Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.
Can love and peace live in the same heart? Youth is unhappy because it is faced with this terrible choice; love without peace, or peace without love.
Some days are happy days - of themselves, as if for their own sakes. They seem to be enjoying themselves, regardless of what use may be made of them.
Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.
Each venture Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be: am an attendant lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the prince.
You'll be surprised how infinitely merciful they [these tablets] are. The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God!
For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.
On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.
Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.
If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.
Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.
It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.
With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in love without making a fool of himself.
When a belief becomes dominant in American psychological circles one can be sure of one thing: that belief refers to something that no longer exists.
No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.
I hope my pieces have an authenticity to them, but my job is to filter the world and tell a story, not to define and recreate exactly what's going on.
I love the intimacy of TV. I love the fact that you don't necessarily have the pressure of an audience or anyone around watching it - just you and it.
I'm a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it's dangerous if I'm seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.
We're all ordinary in a way. We can all be hurt. We can all be unbalanced. We all have feelings. Life can treat us harshly, even shockingly sometimes.
One of the things I find about getting older is that I seem to get louder, more voluble; that I constantly have to walk around repressing my vitality.
I define the American dream as the ability to imagine a way that you want your life to turn out, and have a reasonable hope that you can achieve that.
Even if you're lucky to have a play on Broadway like 'Chinglish,' you don't necessarily earn enough off it to support the years it takes to get there.
Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.