20th-century Playwright Quotes

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

When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.

It is a sin to follow your horoscope because only God knows the future and He won't tell us. Also, we can tell horoscopes are false because according to astrology, Christ would have been a Capricorn, and Capricorn people are cold, ambitious and attracted to Scorpio and Virgo, and we know that Christ was warm, loving, and not attracted to anybody.

Christopher Durang

They are emotional gluttons, both of them. They gobbled up every sensation they could extract from marriage, and now they are seeing if separation won't provide them with a few more.

Margaret Kennedy

As a writer, I have always considered it my job to describe the world as I know it; to struggle toward whatever portion of the truth is available to me,

If you can affect someone when they're young, you are in their heart forever,

If you can no longer think about the future, and you once dreamed of everlasting love, don't give up the dream, find it again.

Oh you'll get used to it—you can bet your ass on that. Captain—you will get used to it.

You gone have to pass off that baton, little man. You in a relay race, albeit the fastest runner we done ever seen't. But you 'bout to burn out, superstar. You gone need to pass off that baton.

And from their trembling lips shall swell
A song of hope the world can understand.
All this to them shall be a glorious sign,
A glimmer of that resurrection morn,
When age-long Faith crowned with a grace benign
Shall rise and from their brows cast down the thorn
Of prejudice. E'en though through blood it be,
There breaks this day their dawn of Liberty.

Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.

Your revolution will not happen between these thighs.

Sarah Jones (stage actress)

Fear is the touch of death, death reminding us of its existence.

I've been living in Portland for five months and I'm not sure how I feel about it. I probably won't really know for years because that's how it works right? You don't really develop feelings about a place till you've left it. It's like a girl or a dog.

Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow.

And suppose we solve all the problems it presents? What happens? We end up with more problems than we started with. Because that's the way problems propagate their species. A problem left to itself dries up or goes rotten. But fertilize a problem with a solution — you'll hatch out dozens.

You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.

Henry: Anytime you hear a man called "loony," just remember that's a great compliment to the man and a great disrespect to the loon. A loon doesn't wage war, his government is perfect, being nonexistent. He is the world's best fisherman and completely in control of his senses, thank you.

Robert E. Lee (playwright)

On directing:

I pride myself on being available to as many people's stories as I possibly can.

George C. Wolfe

So many women here are ruled by their bodies. All buxom or bony and I don't want a confused woman or a careless woman or a depressed woman, Franck, I want a woman who is entirely under control. How can a woman look after my house and my children if she can't even look after her own body?

We are like icebergs in the ocean: one-eighth part consciousness and the rest submerged beneath the surface of articulate apprehension.

William Gerhardie

The soul is a millstone, an albatross, it meddles in everything. It creates ties to torture us.

Marie Vieux Chauvet

You can't. Do you hear me? You think you've figured something out? You run over here so pleased with yourself because you changed your mind. Now you're certain. You're so... sloppy. You don't know anything. The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you decided with your buddies, it's just evidence. It doesn't finish the job. It doesn't prove anything.

I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored.

It doesn't matter what kind of world we live in as long as we have each other.

Look baby, you just have to look at everyone like they're bugs under a microscope. Like ants. Figure out the patterns.

Lydia R. Diamond