American Playwright Quotes

Kurt Vonnegut

Arthur Miller

Tennessee Williams

Gore Vidal

Edward Albee

Steve Martin

Thornton Wilder

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

You're a grand old flag;
You're a high-flying flag.
And forever in peace may you wave.

George M. Cohan

Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.

Sholem Aleichem

Reverend Lawson: You men are homosexual!
Bob (correcting The Reverend): Homosexuals.

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

Robert Brustein

Our lives are not totally random. We make commitments, we cause things to happen.

Wendy Wasserstein

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.

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

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

It is my father. He is arriving again for the night. He comes through the jungle to find me. He never tires of his journey.

Adrienne Kennedy

As a breath on glass, - As witch-fires that burn, The gods and monsters pass, Are dust, and return.

George Sterling

Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic.

Jeff Lindsay (writer)

These days it's hard to look at a poodle without thinking what a good meal he would make.

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

I never get used to it, the unknowable mystery of a person so suddenly, totally closed, snapped shut like a half-read novel.

Linda Barnes (writer)

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)

An optimist … is a person who thinks the future is uncertain.

Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and - if it does not create it - maintains decency.

Florida Scott-Maxwell

I regard the theater as the greatest of all art-forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Thornton Wilder

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.

The progress of the American Revolution has been so rapid and such the alteration of manners, the blending of characters, and the new train of ideas that almost universally prevail, that the principles which animated to the noblest exertions have been nearly annihilated.

Mercy Otis Warren

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.

Lovers are Like walking ghosts, they always haunt the spot Of their misdeeds.

George Henry Boker

MASH] was going to have to be a whole lot more than funny. Funny was easy. How not to trivialize human suffering by trying to be comic about it, that was the challenge.

Yet in a society of conflicting interests the only democratic way in which matters can be improved is through politics, and politics means the compromising of extremes in order to achieve that notorious half loaf which the passionate and the outraged never find sufficient.