Top 100 Playwright Quotes
#1. I'm lucky enough to say my day job is acting. I cut my teeth as a theater actor and playwright in New York.
Christopher Denham
#2. Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction.
Jules Fisher
#3. I did a lot of freelance desk publishing jobs when I graduated from college. I sort of earned a living doing that while I was writing plays, which was what I wanted to do. My hope was to become a playwright.
Jason Katims
#4. I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.
Tony Kushner
#5. I do come from a theater background, where the playwright is optimal and king and you have to serve the playwright. So I am, of course, a huge fan of scripted everything.
Skylar Astin
#6. I was my class playwright and I wrote plays set in villages with kings and chiefs.My plays were about treason and betrayals. If they were influenced by Macbeth, they were also influenced by Nigerian plays I had seen and Village Headmaster, a television drama series I had watched as a child.
Sefi Atta
#7. It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
Kenneth Tynan
#8. Shakespeare broke a mold. After about five years of writing, he saw women as women, including the bind they had been put into. No other playwright, writing before Shakespeare or at the same time as Shakespeare, had ever seen women as women.
Tina Packer
#9. My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.
Lin-Manuel Miranda
#10. Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright's pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.
Maya Angelou
#11. David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet.
Tom Hardy
#12. A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it.
Edward Albee
#13. I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.
Cherry Jones
#14. I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
Tom Stoppard
#15. Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies and directed by Sundance nominee James Ponsoldt, 'The End of the Tour' is a terrific film, among the year's best with its two-man tarantella of wall-to-wall talk - and I watched it through my fingers as though it were Mad Max.
Steve Erickson
#16. I grew up doing theatre and spent a long time as a playwright. I still think very visually when I write.
Libba Bray
#17. I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.
Atom Egoyan
#18. The Playwright was excited in the way a child is excited on Christmas morning. I liked this. Most people didn't get excited about anything other than their own discontent.
Maria Dahvana Headley
#19. It's very hard to be a playwright because it's very competitive.
Jesse Eisenberg
#20. I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
Francis Ford Coppola
#21. You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this.
Reese Witherspoon
#22. The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.
Adam Leith Gollner
#23. You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.
Sam Shepard
#24. But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed
Sherrilyn Kenyon
#25. My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.
Maximilian Schell
#26. One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.
Tracy Letts
#27. I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.
Walter Dean Myers
#28. The director is responsible for interpreting the playwright's work through the cast with the help of the staff. It is the director's artistic concept of the play that the cast, staff, and crew work to obtain.
Laurence Sterne
#29. I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.
Edmund Phelps
#30. I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go steadily and smoothly.
Richard Greenberg
#31. One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.
George Jean Nathan
#32. But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
C.S. Lewis
#33. When you tell people you're a playwright, their eyes sort of glaze over. But when you say you write the 'Fantastic Four' or 'Spider-Man,' they perk up. It's a touchstone that has gained more credibility as artistic expression.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
#34. I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago
#35. Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
Tom Stoppard
#36. My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.
John Mahoney
#37. I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#38. Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.
David Ives
#39. I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.
Ellen McLaughlin
#40. I am not a playwright. A playwright would take Antigone and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.
Seamus Heaney
#41. The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.
Marsha Norman
#42. My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward.
Wallace Shawn
#43. Being a playwright, a film producer, a minister, a general; these are all masks one wears over one's face in the society; masks don't mean anything, for a man is what he is!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#44. A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.
George Bernard Shaw
#45. 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?
Don DeLillo
#46. Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
Edward Albee
#47. 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.
August Wilson
#48. With [Columbus'] sailors ready to revolt, land--as if cued by a hack playwright--suddenly materialized at the horizon on October 12, 1492.
Alan Axelrod
#49. Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.
Mindy Kaling
#50. It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.
Peter Shaffer
#51. As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.
George M. Cohan
#52. Everybody wants to identify things about a poet or about a playwright. They want to codify something or put it in terms that can be understood. We want to understand something, because that's how our minds work. We like to understand things, and it's discomfiting if we don't understand things.
Anthony Zerbe
#53. Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.
William Goldman
#54. I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.
Adam Rapp
#55. A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.
John Lahr
#56. It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
Beth Henley
#57. I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
John Logan
#58. I started acting pretty much by accident. I was doing read-throughs for a playwright who I was assisting, and then an agency saw me and said they wanted to represent me and get with me through my training and so on and so forth. It was pretty much by chance.
Guy Burnet
#59. At first, this earth, a stage so gloomed with woe
You all but sicken at the shifting scenes
And yet be patient. Our playwright may show
In some filth act what this wild drama means.
Jack London
#60. There's no American playwright after 1945 who wasn't profoundly affected - who didn't have their DNA changed by Tennessee Williams.
John Guare
#62. With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.
Martin McDonagh
#63. I think he [Vaclav Havel] probably would have liked to have written more plays. I think he missed being a playwright.I think he talked about wanting to write plays and keep appealing to people through that medium, rather than politics.
Judy Woodruff
#64. I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
Peter Shaffer
#65. Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.
Arthur Miller
#66. I can write better plays than any living danced, and dance better than any living playwright.
George M. Cohan
#67. In America they have to know just what you are
novelist, poet, playwright ... Well, I've been all of them ... I think poems and novels and stories spring from the same seed. It's not like, say, playing polo and knitting.
Robert Penn Warren
#68. I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he ... he failed, basically.
Ben Affleck
#69. If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
Noel Coward
#70. When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
Francis Ford Coppola
#71. One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.
Tony Kushner
#72. I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.
Suzanne Collins
#73. For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.
Tom Stoppard
#74. I was born in Newton, MA. Graduated from Brown University in 2001 with honors in English as a playwright. I attended the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, CT just after Brown. I moved to NYC in 2002 and was a professional ... waiter, for 3 years.
John Krasinski
#75. Write Scientific Fantasies! - B. Sablerfils, playwright of A Hero for All Ages, shows you how! Inquire at the University of New Seran.
Brandon Sanderson
#76. I took a page from [the playwright] Wendy Wasserstein's book. She said 'I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist.'
Sarah Jessica Parker
#77. Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.
Gavin Hood
#78. An actor in a playwright's hide," he said sadly. "I'll never not be vain." "Oh, well. It's you," she said. "You're desperate for the love of strangers. To be seen." "You see me," he said, and he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased. "I do," she said. "Now.
Lauren Groff
#79. The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
George Pierce Baker
#80. Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
Mark Helprin
#81. If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.
James Thurber
#82. As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
Tom Stoppard
#83. The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
Joseph Weizenbaum
#84. When Jennie, mother of Winston Churchill invited playwright George Bernard Shaw to lunch, he telegraphed: "Certainly not. What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habits?" She replied, "Know nothing of your habits; hope they are better than your manners."
Anne Sebba
#85. The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.
John Lahr
#86. I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'
Noah Hawley
#87. Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
Alex Cox
#89. I love what I do, and I love the audience, and I love the fact that I get to do it, and I love, I love our craft very, very, much, and it's a noble craft. We have a responsibility to it, and to the audience, and to the playwright, and to the message. I won't ever care less.
Patti LuPone
#90. [Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.
Robert Dessaix
#91. I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.
Mitchell Hurwitz
#92. A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.
Terry Teachout
#93. If I'd seen a playwright ever write an' play at the same time, I'd have given 'em more of a chance at cards. Can I get an 'amen?'
Mark Twain
#94. William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced; and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland.
Kenneth Tynan
#95. When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
Gabrielle Zevin
#96. 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.
Terence Rattigan
#97. I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in it.
John Patrick Shanley
#98. One of the things that's different about London and the English market is that theater and film and television are all based in London. It's not quite the same as in the States where if the playwright here wants a successful TV or film career, they're whisked away by Hollywood.
Colin Callender
#99. The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.
Brian K. Vaughan
#100. February 5: Laurence Olivier, his agent Cecil Tennant, and playwright Terence Rattigan arrive in New York to discuss with Marilyn a film of The Sleeping Prince, to be produced in London with Olivier and Marilyn in the starring roles.
Carl Rollyson
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