Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Everything is made out of Magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us. In this garden-in all the places.
No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you’ll get nothing else.
Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.
I found the offer of a knighthood something that I couldn't possibly accept. I found it to be somehow squalid, a knighthood. There's a relationship to government about knights.
If only I could master that demon of procrastination that goes about like a roaring lion and devours all my good intentions, I should become the most punctual man in the world.
So to conduct one's life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.
From kings to groundlings, Shakespeare made his work profound for everybody. That is how it should be. There is no hierarchy in theatre. It makes everyone part of a collective.
You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.
Money is the worst currency that ever grew among mankind. This sacks cities, this drives men from their homes, this teaches and corrupts the worthiest minds to turn base deeds.
The ideal condition would be, I admit, that men should be right by instinct; but since we are all likely to go astray, The reasonable thing is to learn from those who can teach
Best of children, sisters arm-in-arm, we must bear what the gods give us to bear-- don't fire up your hearts with so much grief. No reason to blame the pass you've come to now.
Yet I pity the poor wretch, though he's my enemy. He's yoked to an evil delusion, but the same fate could be mine. I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeing shadows.
One should rather die than be betrayed. There is no deceit in death. It delivers precisely what it has promised. Betrayal, though ... betrayal is the willful slaughter of hope.
We don't see the Bible as it is itself. We see it in relation to a lot of people who surround it. And because we don't care for some of them, we think we shouldn't care for it.
I'm aware that a film is different than a play, and that a film isn't going to be the filmed record of the play. It's its own separate entity, and I've come to peace with that.
Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.
The child was diseased at birth, stricken with a hereditary ill that only the most vital men are able to shake off. I mean poverty-the most deadly and prevalent of all diseases.
I don't get tired, because every time a woman doesn't die or doesn't get beaten or doesn't get raped or doesn't get honor-killed or doesn't get acid-burned, it's a huge victory.
...to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humour, to make them visible so that can not be ravaged in the dark without great consequence.
You reach a time... when fact and fiction blend seamlessly. If you do it too soon, it's journalism. If you do it too late, you forget, and it's fantasy. There's an optimum time.
What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.
I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?
If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.
Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculousand dangerous by having its feet off the ground.
Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.
Different people have different duties assigned them by Nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.
Corruption is a tree, whose branches are Of an immeasurable length: they spread Ev'rywhere; and the dew that drops from thence Hath infected some chairs and stools of authority.
A really good comedy, I think, is played as if it was real, and it's the circumstances that make it amusing. And I think that the - the inverse or the reverse is true for drama.
The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we've found a new and a better idea.
I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
I've always been very honest about what's good and bad in my writing. That honesty might have made me sound arrogant sometimes, when I was talking about work I thought was good.
Stop thinking about writing as art. Think of it as work. If you’re an artist, whatever you do is going to be art. If you’re not an artist, at least you can do a good day’s work.
If any of my plays outlive me or get on library book shelves and somehow stay read, all of a sudden it's a testament to "that's part of our culture, that's part of our history."
The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief.
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall
That was my way of putting it-not very satisfactory: A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle With words and meanings.
Denver's commitment to giving contemporary storytellers the stage is crucial to the American theater. That's something embraced by 'Smash.' We should be telling our own stories.
The way 'star' used to be reserved for a small number of people, and when the star category became so vast, they came up with 'superstar,' and then they came up with 'megastar.'
Sloth is the fastest-growing lifestyle movement in the world, and that's because it is completely doable. If you embrace sloth, it's the last thing you'll ever have to do again.
If you're dealing with a powerful leader, you're inevitably going to have a dialogue with her political past. It was always my intention to interrogate Thatcher's political life.
I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I've got, and the more I've written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.
The media doesn't create narratives, really. They're not that powerful. What they do is they tap into narratives that are already bubbling amongst their viewership or readership.
Conservatives believe in smaller government and in the power of the electorate. So I think that we're less likely to try to use a dramatic forum to warp people's political views.
Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.
We revolutionaries acknowledge the right to revolution when we see that the situation is no longer tolerable, that it has become a frozen. Then we have the right to overthrow it.
Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted - to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself.
Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.