Browsing Topic Best Playwright Quotes

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

If you are lonely when you’re alone, you are in bad company.

Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.

Love has no age, no limit; and no death.

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.

America’s founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more – and nothing less.

A playwright… is… the litmus paper of the arts. He’s got to be, because if he isn’t working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

Theatre can entertain, provoke, challenge, investigate, comfort and educate. It’s arrogant of a playwright to think education is more important than anything else. Writing for the theatre does not give you permission to lecture, hector or bore.

If it’s stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it’s film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

I’m a black American playwright. I couldn’t be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they’re all cut out of the same cloth. That’s who I am; that’s who I write about.

I think of myself as a narrative artist. I don’t think of myself as a novelist or screenwriter or playwright. All of those modalities of processing and experiencing narrative are obviously very different, and I’m not sure that I prefer any one to the other. I think the novel gives you the opportunity to have a kind of interiority that you can’t have in the theater, which is pure exteriority.

I am. I think. I will.

When men abandon reason, physical force becomes their only means of dealing with one another and of settling disagreements.

The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.

During the shooting of a scene the director’s eye has to catch even the minutest detail. But this does not mean glaring concentratedly at the set. While the cameras are rolling, I rarely look directly at the actors, but focus my gaze somewhere else. By doing this I sense instantly when something isn’t right. Watching something does not mean fixing your gaze on it, but being aware of it in a natural way. I believe this is what the medieval Noh playwright and theorist Zeami meant by ‘watching with a detached gaze.’

The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings.

I have always felt it a great privilege to be in the theater, and I am grateful to all the playwrights who have given me so many wonderful roles. It’s a terrifying business, but it has its compensations. Where else could I have found someone who for 50 years has given me sheer enchantment?

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I’m taking away something from them [designers]. I’m taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.

All the reasons which made the initiation of physical force evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative.

Self-sacrifice? But it is precisely the self that cannot and must not be sacrificed.

But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

Sometimes we go to a play and after the curtain has been up five minutes we have a sense of being able to settle back in the arms of the playwright. Instinctively we know that the playwright knows his business.

An article on playwrights in the Daily Mail , listed according to Hard Left, Soft Left, Hard Right, Soft Right and Centre. I am not listed. I should probably come under Soft Centre.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

I am a playwright. I show What I have seen. In the man markets I have seen how men are traded. That I show, I, the playwright.