20th-century Playwright Quotes

Rooms are a fixed size, which can't be altered without pulling down walls and building new ones. They should be unchanging in shape and proportions. But sometimes they do change depending on who's in them.

A guardian angel comes when you are very young, and gives you special dispensation. From what? From the world. Yours might be luck. Mine is money.

You cannot sit at home as a twenty-year-old poet. You don't know anything about life.

I feel like I'm eighty years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.

My personal life is lived as 'me,' but my professional life is lived as other people. In other words, when I go to the office, I lie down, dream, and become 'someone else.' That's my job.

The love of those among whom one has been reared is usually not love at all. One can die inwardly without any of them being aware of it.

Evelyn Scott (writer)

Puberty is the cradle of love, senility its cremation.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

Robert Wilson (director)

Wednesday (as Pocahontas): You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations; your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the roadside; you will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation; your people will have stick-shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."
Becky (as Sarah Miller): Gary, she's changing the words!
Wednesday (as Pocahontas): And for all these reasons, I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.

There's a word in Japanese for being sad in the springtime - a whole word for just being sad - about how pretty the flowers are and how soon they're going to die.

People don't fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it's too much.

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.

A woman's got as much right -and more cause - to get drunk than any man

Shelagh Delaney

in the middle of the night
people tell their dreams
and it is important, even
though there is never much
of an audience.

Michelene Wandor

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.

To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.

No hate has ever unlocked the myriad interlacings—the front of love. Hate is nothing.

under a soprano sky, a woman sings,
lovely as chandeliers.

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.

One has to look out for engineers – they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.

I kinda like it when you forget to give me presents. It makes me feel like we're married.

I am beset with a dream of fair woman,
Lunatic for Venus flesh...

I want to be famous so I can be humble about being famous. What good is my humility when I am stuck in this obscurity?

That's what she was, Joanna felt suddenly. That's what they all were, all the Stepford wives: actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleansers, shampoos, and deodorants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.

Well, there's no guarantee of failure in life like happiness in high school.

David Henry Hwang