20th-century Playwright Quotes

Life is a banquet, and most poor sons-of-bitches are starving to death.

Jerome Lawrence

Poetry is road maintenance for a fragmented world which seeks to be kept together. It's been an integral activity for a long time.

That just ain't cricket, is it dear?
Or they may say, and it will be true,
Britain does not rule the waves
She simply waives the bloody rules!

To improve man - that's the beginning of all terror. Religion founders, totalitarians, self-righteous playwrights, ideologues, they always want the new man, the better one.

I have always considered it despicable to grovel for your life as if life were a favor. If you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living

Reinaldo Arenas

The poor tread lightest upon the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and the more havoc we wreak.

Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness. I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see I have been found out.

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.

You coulda been a singer, Ma. Play Vegas. And I'd write ya spicy songs to slither out of your throat like barracudas.

Confidence is a static state. Determination is active. Determination allows for doubt and for humility - both of which are critical in the world today. There is so much that we don't know, and so much that we know we don't know. To be overly confident or without doubt seems silly to me. Determination, on the other hand, is a commitment to win, a commitment to fight the good fight.

Anna Deavere Smith

Nothing conveys the feeling of infinity as much as stupidity does.

Ödön von Horváth

There are two kinds of people in one's life-people whom one keeps waiting-and the people for whom one waits

We are all of us invented. We are all of us cobbled together from cartilage and dust. Few of us know with certainty the name of our maker. But I do... Bram Stoker.

Radio listeners are voyeurs: lurking, invisible, eavesdropping.

Paul Fleischman

My nights are rich with mystery, my dreams breathless with expectation.

Seminar is not yet officially a transitive verb. Still, most graduate students in any large research-oriented university have at times felt themselves more the helpless objects of a seminar than its active participants. Seminared into numbness describes that feeling of oversaturation.

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Edward Carey (novelist)

If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practice ends up as me first, me only, and in rampant greed.

Richard Nelson (playwright)

So even the most unlikely events have to take place somewhere...

David Lindsay-Abaire

It seems to me if they ain't got you one way then they've got you another. So what's it all about, that's what I keep asking myself, what's it all about?

An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on
me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me
shillelagh out next, wait'll you see.

Martin McDonagh

Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood! This was his meaning to his people. And, in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves.... And we shall know him then for what he was and is—a prince, our own black shining Prince!—who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so.

Without a doubt the sense of beauty does not lie determined in the concreteness of an individual beautiful thing or person. Rather its purpose is much more the enchantment of the soul, for there is nothing physical that is not made with the intent of affecting the soul, and there is no soul that does not intend to dazzle everything physical with its sensations.

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Texas is my mind's country, that place I most want to understand and record and preserve. Four generations of my people sleep in its soil; I have children there, and a grandson; the dead past and the living future tie me to it.

When you collaborate with other people, you tend to regard your own individual contribution as the most important.