Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A lot of '20s musicals were a hodgepodge of melodrama, mixed with operetta and romance, and then some sense of modernism and some sense of irreverence.
I do tend to think that I've written a great deal out of my unconscious because half the time I don't know what a given character is going to say next.
A single moment spent in a business meeting or at a pub is more than enough to reveal the basic human truth that we are all faking it most of the time.
Pretending is the basis of civilised society, and it is sometimes necessary for all of us. Without it we are nothing more than a pack of snarling dogs.
I've done a lot of assignment work in my life, and the only way you can do it is to make it your own as quickly as possible, and then you give it back.
There are some situations in life that are simply not funny, and there's nothing funny about them, but they're rare, and they don't last all that long.
It was then, I think, that I discovered that the best way of bringing a medieval subject home to my generation was not to be medieval in its treatment.
It's much easier to conjure characters strictly from your imagination than to have to think about whether you're representing people in a truthful way.
I always describe race as the final taboo in American theatre. There's a real reluctance to have that conversation in an open, honest way on the stage.
There is an enduring feeling that women can write domestic dramas but don't have the muscularity or the vision to write state-of-the-nation narratives.
We always say about Hollywood that it's a company town and it's sort of is. It's like in Washington, they say, you know, the company is the government.
According to my mother, positively no one, least of all herself, had even the faintest suspicion that she was heavy with child at the time of my birth.
I am quite sure that a little man who braves ridicule to improve the lot of his fellow men, and is thanked by their jibes, is an interesting character.
I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.
I've come to feel that if I can't make something happen in under an hour and a half, it's not going to happen in a compelling way in a three-hour play.
Careers don't interest me. The only thing that interests me is continuing to be a poet on one level or another, whether acting or writing or directing.
I've been into horses as far back as I can remember. There is a particular kind here in America called the 'quarter horse' that I'm very interested in.
I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?
Fortune raises up and fortune brings low both the man who fares well and the one who fares badly; and there is no prophet of the future for mortal men.
The shimmering night does not stay for mortals, not misfortunes, nor wealth, but in a moment it is gone, and to the turn of another comes joy and loss.
I'm an American. We've translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success - and that's getting Americanised.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone, She smooths her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
I don't ask for your pity, but just your understanding - no, not even that -no. Just for your recognition of me in you, and the enemy, time, in us all.
When things don’t change, their sameness becomes an accretion. That is why all society puts on flesh. Succumbs to the cubicles and begins to fill them.
But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK.
The life force is vigorous. The delight that accompanies it counter-balances all the pains and hardships that confront men. It makes life worth living.
It is not for nothing that artists have called their works the children of their brains and likened the pains of production to the pains of childbirth.
Chaos is my natural habitat. I write about chaotic situations and about people finding their way through the chaos, the hope that you can find your way.
We have a desperate need for producers in the [commercial Broadway] theatre, and it is very hard for them to get money and find investors for new plays.
I know no disease of the soul but ignorance, a pernicious evil, the darkener of man's life, the disturber of his reason, and common confounder of truth.
I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.
I like to flip through play scripts, not just my own; there is something exciting about seeing printed language on a page that triggers responses in me.
Now, drama is quite useful at helping us to understand what our position is and, conversely, we might then understand why our theatre is being destroyed
As much as football can cause war, it can also cause peace. Football is a kind of Geiger counter of civilisation, or a catalyst for good as well as bad.
Not just my parents, but teachers, friends, mentors - a host of people are to be thanked for any success I have had, and a whole lot of just plain luck.
Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice
A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.
Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.
Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.
Peace of the sort that brings wholeness, harmony, and health to our lives only happens when chaos, confusion, and conflict are included and transcended.
No TV show in history, no movie ever made - nothing you can imagine as being written or filmed or performed can turn a normal human being into a Dexter.
My identity is linked to my grandmother, who's pure Filipino, as pure as you can probably get. And that shaped my imagination. So that's how I identify.
Some actors are brilliant in David Mamet, but they would crash and burn in my plays and visa-versa. You either have my music in your body, or you don't.
There's a strange thing goes on inside a bubble. It's hard to describe. People who are in it can't see outside of it, don't believe there is an outside.
An obstacle is not a discouragement. It may become one, but only with our own consent. So long as we refuse to be discouraged, we cannot be discouraged.
A society needs famous people; the question is whom it chooses for that role. Any criticism of its choice is by implication a criticism of that society.
The theatre breeds its own kind of cruelty, and its sadism takes on a keener edge since it can be enjoyed under the innocent guise of critical judgment.