American Playwright Quotes

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

Modern American marriage is like a wire fence. The woman's the wire -the posts are the husband's.

Langdon Elwyn Mitchell

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.

It has nothing to do with belief. It's a fact. It's the truth! As a scientist, I know it's true because science is based on skepticism. We consider all possibilities equally and decide on facts based on what stands up to empirical evidence. Which is how I know that you gomers are absolutely and totally wrong.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

I tell you of all history the most beautiful product is the family tie.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

George Sterling

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

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,