Quotes on Playwright

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Eyeing the traffic circulating the lobby hung with bad art. Big invasive stuff unloaded on Stanley Bard in exchange for rent. The hotel is an energetic, desperate haven for scores of gifted hustling children from every rung of the ladder. Guitar bums and stoned-out beauties in Victorian dresses. Junkie poets, playwrights, broke-down filmmakers, and French actors. Everybody passing through here is somebody, if not in the outside world.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual, holy, disruptive, and contagious and it breaks the rules. It can happen anywhere, at anytime, with anyone and everyone, and it's free. Dance joins us and pushes us to go further and that is why it's at the center of ONE BILLION RISING.

Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

We rely upon the poets, the philosophers, and the playwrights to articulate what most of us can only feel, in joy or sorrow. They illuminate the thoughts for which we only grope; they give us the strength and balm we cannot find in ourselves. Whenever I feel my courage wavering, I rush to them. They give me the wisdom of acceptance, the will and resiliance to push on.

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

Don't keep a man guessing too long - he's sure to find the answer somewhere else.

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.

Never say goodbye because goodbye means going away and going away means forgetting.

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

If music be the food of love, play on.

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

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

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

A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.

Yet the ivory gods, And the ebony gods, And the gods of diamond-jade, Are only silly puppet gods That people themselves Have made.-

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.