Playwright Quotes

I thought I was doing my duty for my country. I didn't know I was going to be treated like a convict. Did it make better soldiers of the callow youths we were then? I doubt it.

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

During relaxation we drop our guard. Particularly in conversation. Relaxed conversation leads to openness. And in openness we often reveal what should never be revealed.

Edward Carey (novelist)

I feel like I'm eighty years old. I'm tired of life and my mind wants to die.

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)

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

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

The head has its confines. The head's got those all right, and the heart. The heart has its reasons.

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.

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

An Irishman I am, begora! With a heart and a spirit on
me not crushed be a hundred years of oppression. I'll be getting me
shillelagh out next, wait'll you see.

Martin McDonagh

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

My nights are rich with mystery, my dreams breathless with expectation.

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

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.