20th-century Playwright Quotes

Bertolt Brecht

Samuel Beckett

Kurt Vonnegut

Václav Havel

Harold Pinter

Arthur Miller

Graham Greene

One of the main reasons why the sciences are so poor is that they imagine they are so rich. It isn't their job to throw open the door to infinite wisdom but to put a limit to infinite error.

Galileo speaking

There's only us, there's only this. Forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way. No day but today!

Jonathan Larson

Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.

Adrian Mitchell

Misery's fine - as long as you know you can get out of it when you want to.

Every one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand is like every other one-night-stand or man in a one-night-stand because the sex in a one-night-stand is without time and only time allows value.

I don't feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward.

One can make one's life a complete misery, worrying about burglaries and shipwrecks, but ask anyone, anyone you know... earth-shattering disasters and fabulous inheritances all seems to take place exclusively in the newspapers.

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

Salad, I can't bear salad. It grows while you're eating it, you know.

Do not despair. Remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices.

Margaret: Haven't you done as much as God can reasonably want?
More: Well... finally... it isn't a matter of reason; finally it's a matter of love.
Alice: You're content, then, to be shut up here with mice and rats when you might be home with us!
More: Content? If they'd open a crack that wide I'd be through it. Well, has Eve run out of apples?
Margaret: I've not yet told you what the house is like, without you.
More: Don't, Meg.
Margaret: What we do in the evenings, now that you're not there.
More: Meg, have done!
Margaret: We sit in the dark because we've no candles. And we've no talk because we're wondering what they're doing to you here.
More: The King's more merciful than you. He doesn't use the rack.

The love that previously dared not speak its name has now grown hoarse from screaming it.

Robert Brustein

The paranoiac is the exact image of the ruler. The only difference is their position in the world. One might even think the paranoiac the more impressive of the two because he is sufficient unto himself and cannot be shaken by failure.

Everything interesting takes place in the dark; there is no doubt about it. We know nothing of the true story of the men. ―

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Comedies of manners swiftly become obsolete when there are no longer any manners.

Fame is something different from popularity. It is less demanding for a start and has more to do with talent than virtue. But not even much to do with talent.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.

Things get shaped straight and thin for reasons of aerodynamics. Missiles and skyscrapers are shaped the way they are on the soundest principles of engineering, not as monuments to the dick. In fact, so is the dick. The dick is shaped like a dick because that is the most efficient shape for a dick to be. That's why it's dick shaped. I mean a dick shaped like a table would cause all sorts of practical spatial problems.

The "Theatre of the Absurd" has become a catch-phrase, much used and much abused. What does it stand for? And how can such a label be justified? Perhaps it will be best to attempt to answer the second question first. There is no organised movement, no school of artists, who claim the label for themselves. A good many playwrights who have been classed under this label, when asked if they belong to the Theatre of the Absurd, will indigniantly reply that they belong to no such movement — and quite rightly so. For each of the playwrights concerned seeks to express no more and no less his own personal vision of the world.
Yet critical concepts of this kind are useful when new modes of expression, new conventions of art arise.

Adults must remember that they look like insane giants to children.

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

There are all sorts of ways of murdering a person or at least his soul, and that's something no police in the world can spot.

I know your cause is lost, but in the heart / Of all right causes is a cause that cannot lose.

Christopher Fry

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.