American Playwright Quotes

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.

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.

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

He seems a little under the weather, somehow; and yet he's not sick.

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.

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

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

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

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