Moss Hart Quotes

#1. Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can if make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!

Moss Hart

#2. There's nothing the matter with Hollywood that a good earthquake couldn't cure.

Moss Hart

#3. You'd be surprised how many kings are only a queen with a moustache.

Moss Hart

#4. Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

Moss Hart

#5. So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o'clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.

Moss Hart

#6. Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own.

Moss Hart

#7. Julie Andrews has a wonderful British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.

Moss Hart

#8. A too constant preoccupation with money may seem to indicate the lack of a proper sense of moral values, but [let] those who have always had money ... be without it for a while, and they will soon discover how quickly it becomes their chief concern.

Moss Hart

#9. There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.

Moss Hart

#10. Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

Moss Hart

#11. The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature-there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre.

Moss Hart

#12. I have had the irreplaceable opportunity of learning my profession with the proper tools, the most important of which is not a pencil or a typewriter, but the necessary time to think before using them.

Moss Hart

#13. There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.

Moss Hart

#14. The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.

Moss Hart

#15. Boredom is the keynote of poverty ... it's dark brown sameness.

Moss Hart

#16. Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.

Moss Hart

#17. One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick.

Moss Hart

#18. How many of us would be willing to settle when we're young for what we eventually get? All those plans we make ... what happens to them? It's only a handful of the lucky ones that can look back and say that they even came close.

Moss Hart

#19. Self-pity is not a pleasant emotion and is a fruitless one as well, for its point of no return is an onset of black despair in very short order.

Moss Hart

#20. Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.

Moss Hart

#21. Without vanity a writer's work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.

Moss Hart

#22. I have had many successes and many failures in my life. My successes have always been for different reasons, but my failures have always been for the same reason: I said yes when I meant no.

Moss Hart

#23. Charity in the theatre usually begins and ends with people who have a play opening the week following one's own. Their unlikely benevolence is not so much a purity of heart as the knowledge that they face a firing line with rifles aimed in exactly the same direction.

Moss Hart

#24. One of the grave dangers inherent in the various stages of any theatrical career-whether it be budding, quiescent or diminishing-is the advice of friends.

Moss Hart

#25. A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.

Moss Hart

#26. Boredom is the keynote of poverty - of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with - for where there is no money there is no change of any kind.

Moss Hart

#27. There is something maddening about mediocrity that calls forth the worst in those who are forced to deal with it.

Moss Hart

#28. The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.

Moss Hart

#29. I have always understood the unbelieving look in the eyes of those whom success touches early - it is a look half fearful, as though the dream were still in the process of being dreamed and to move or to speak would shatter it.

Moss Hart

#30. All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'.

Moss Hart