Playwright Quotes

Somehow love gives even to a dull man the knowledge of his lover's heart.

Once you smear it, or you scratch it,
It's impossible to match it.

Arthur Wing Pinero

Of every noble action the intent
Is to give worth reward, vice punishment.

Beaumont and Fletcher

Caring. Not the most exciting of words, is it? Almost as humble as a tool. But that is the Alchemist's Stone of human endeavour.

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

The spring in Boston is like being in love: bad days slip in among the good ones, and the whole world is at a standstill, then the sun shines, the tears dry up, and we forget that yesterday was stormy.

Louise Closser Hale

I am beset with a dream of fair woman,
Lunatic for Venus flesh...

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

Marquis: Put a duck on a lake in the midst of some swans, and you'll see he'll miss his pond and eventually return to it.
Montrichard: Longing to be back in the mud!

If melodrama is the quintessence of drama, farce is the quintessence of theatre. Melodrama is written. A moving image of the world is provided by a writer. Farce is acted. The writer's contribution seems not only absorbed but translated.... One cannot imagine melodrama being improvised. The improvised drama was pre-eminently farce.

I'm hither come, but what d'ye think to say?
A woman's pen presents you with a play:
Who smiling told me I'd be sure to see
That once confirmed, the house would empty be.

Frances Boothby

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

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.

First rape a people
simmer for centuries
bring memories to boil
foil voice of drum
add pinch of pain
to rain of rage
stifle drum again
then mix strains of blood
over slow fire
watch fever grow

One has to look out for engineers – they begin with sewing machines and end up with the atomic bomb.

Will you tell me how a man's
to live, and face his life, if he can't believe
that truth's like a fire,
and will burn through and be seen
though it takes all the years there are?

Maxwell Anderson

Whoever has but a moment to live has nothing more to hide.

Philippe Quinault

Still-born Silence! thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart.

Richard Flecknoe

A woman's got as much right -and more cause - to get drunk than any man

Shelagh Delaney

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.

Frossia's husband had the ability to feel the voltage of an electric current like a personal emotion. He animated everything that his hands or mind touched, so he really understood the flow of forces in any piece of mechanism and could actually feel the painful, patient resistance of the metal body of a machine.

Andrei Platonov

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother-Death.

Arthur Schnitzler

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

The poor tread lightest upon the earth. The higher our income, the more resources we control and the more havoc we wreak.

I am very bothered when I think of the bad things I have done in my life. Not least that time in the chemistry lab when I held a pair of scissors by the blades and played the handles in the naked lilac flame of the Bunsen burner, then called your name, and handed them over.