Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.
The act of witnessing is important to me; somebody's got to tell the truth, you know what I mean?
I hated her now with a hatred more fatal than indifference because it was the other side of love.
To find beauty in the sad, hope in the midst of loss, and dignity in failure is great poetic art.
My idea of perfect happiness is a healthy family, peace between nations, and all the critics die.
Make the audience wonder what's going on by putting them in the same position as the protagonist.
I am not interested in living in a city where there isn't a production by Samuel Beckett running.
To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.
If I'm writing something and I'm not feeling mischievous, then I know it's not going to be great.
A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.
We are where centuries only count as seconds, and after a thousand lives, our eyes begin to open.
I was born in Manhattan and grew up in Scarsdale. Scarsdale didn't work for me as a place at all.
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.
The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
Nobel Prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.
Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
Oh, the frontier of hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
There is a strange kind of parental pride when 'Topdog' ends up on Broadway, or 'Elaine Stritch.'
Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.
My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have
It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all.
I actually have blissfully romantic views of marriage, because that has been my experience of it.
When I started earning money from screen-writing, for a long time my only indulgences were books.
I'm a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.
I think that certainty is a closed door, It's the end of the conversation. Doubt is an open door.
In a normal education everything is designed to suppress spontaneity, but I wanted to develop it.
I personally don't need to see a story about a person that starts up miserable and ends up worse.
Modern American marriage is like a wire fence. The woman's the wire -the posts are the husband's.
There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing.
Like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, I try to balance reality with how we'd like the world to be.
To have known how to change the past into a few saddened smiles-is this not to master the future?
To think about and prepare for war is boring, boring for everyone. It's being locked in barracks.
Poverty is a thorough instructress in all the arts. [Lat., Paupertas . . . omnes artes perdocet.]
When you fly from temptation, don't leave a forwarding address. Where there's smoke there's fire.
In wondrous ways do the gods make sport with men. [Lat., Miris modis Di ludos faciunt hominibus.]
There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience.
We can say of Shakespeare, that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.
Time past and time future allow but a little consciousness. To be conscious is not to be in time.
A people without history Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern Of timeless moments.
The Church must be forever building, for it is forever decaying within and attacked from without.
And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
When so many are lonely as seem to be lonely, it would be inexcusably selfish to be lonely alone.
For nowadays the world is lit by lightning! Blow out your candles, Laura -- and so goodbye. . . .
We should look at the lives of all as at a mirror, and take from others an example for ourselves.
So in case there was any doubt, I am here to report that having a play on Broadway does not suck.
The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born.