American Playwright Quotes

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

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.

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

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

Bizarre as was the name she bore, Kim Ravenal always said she was thankful it had been no worse.

Once you start compromising your thoughts, you're a candidate for mediocrity.

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.

There oughta be a woman can break down
Sit down, break down, sit down.

Doubt seems the only purity for those who are too fervent to deny, and too lucid to affirm.

Natalie Clifford Barney

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.

Glory glory alleluia
I'm the luckiest of females
For I've danced with a man
Who's danced with a girl
Who's danced with the Prince of Wales.

Herbert Farjeon

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

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

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)

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

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

George Sterling

A Universalist, your heart cannot but dilate, and your affections widen, until the divine expansion, like the ambient atmosphere, embraces every form, which is acted upon by an immortal spirit.

Judith Sargent Murray

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.

Writing is a solitary pursuit and I think you have to be partially at peace with yourself, but it's the other part that's usually producing the stuff worth reading.

Craig Johnson (author)

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive.

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

Wendy Wasserstein

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

To say in print what she thinks is the last thing the woman novelist or journalist is so rash as to attempt…Her publishers are not women.

Elizabeth Robins

Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

We can only do what is possible for us to do. But still it is good to know what the impossible is.

María Irene Fornés