Top 100 Playwright Quotes
#2. 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
#3. Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.
Israel Horovitz
#4. I think I can be an intimidating energy in the room. I think I come in with an aura of wanting results because as the playwright, I know how it goes, and there's the thought, 'Why can't they catch up?'
Richard Greenberg
#5. I'm not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent - which was careless because there'd be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.
Laura Wade
#6. I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.
George R R Martin
#7. It seems that the hurdle you have to jump over is everyone's informed opinion. When you're a young playwright, you're probably too precarious in your own technique to understand that when these seemingly informed opinions are contradicting each other, it becomes this paralyzing monolith.
Richard Greenberg
#8. 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.
Brad Dourif
#9. Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in the world. In London, actors are given their head.
Orson Welles
#10. I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.
Laura Linney
#11. I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one."
- George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)
"Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one."
- Churchill's response
George Bernard Shaw
#12. I wish I were not sensual... I wish I had not got from my mother, or my father was it, this need to grasp and be grasped, because it drives me into the arms of idiots who want to crush me. Wonderful, idiotic, crushing in the night. Can't you just crush me in the night?
Howard Barker
#13. You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.
David Henry Hwang
#14. A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.
David Mamet
#15. Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world's brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.
Terry Teachout
#16. If the playwright knew every little thing about his play, why bother? There must be discovery all the time, otherwise why bother to do it?
Phylicia Rashad
#17. One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.
Simon McBurney
#18. We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.
C.S. Lewis
#19. A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Wilson Mizner
#20. When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'
Jeff Lindsay
#21. The person I would trust the most is my mom. She's just really creative ... She's a playwright and she's a musician.
Jazmine Sullivan
#22. I crave for knowledge. I envy tolerant, peaceful folks. I am frightened by ignorance. I loathe violence.
Tsegaye Gebre Medhin
#23. An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer?
Jason Lutes
#24. The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create 'characters' in a 'setting' who speak 'dialogue' encased in 'scenes.' Most importantly, you - like the playwright - have an 'audience.'
Nancy Kress
#25. Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
Harold Bloom
#26. In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.
Tracy Letts
#27. No matter how successful I become as a playwright, my mother would be thrilled to hear me tell her that I'd just lost twenty pounds, gotten married and become a lawyer.
Wendy Wasserstein
#28. In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have ... But I never did write a play.
Alice McDermott
#29. If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.
Marsha Norman
#30. Damn everything but the circus! ... The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.
E. E. Cummings
#31. Portraying Mozart is a scary task. Whenever I'm asked to portray actual historic figures, it comes with extra accountability. Not just to your director and playwright, but to the man himself and the beloved persona that the public forms.
Rob McClure
#33. In terms of collaboration, working on a new piece is always thrilling, as I'm sure most people would say, because the playwright is in the room and the piece itself evolves in response to what is happening in the room.
Gideon Glick
#34. Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.
Tony Kushner
#35. We all think we are actors, given our scripts. But really? You're the playwright. You're the composer.
David Levithan
#36. And tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me ...
Sarah Kane
#37. The biggest inspiration for everything I do is, of course, my wife, playwright Ruth McKee.
Brian K. Vaughan
#38. 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
#39. I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.
John Guare
#40. The passions and pain of the Vietnam War have subsided to a degree to which we are now able to look at the broader achievements of the Johnson administration," said playwright Robert Schenkkan, whose Broadway show about the president, "All the Way," is playing to packed houses.
The Washington Post
#41. My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.
Suzan-Lori Parks
#43. A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
David Mamet
#44. To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.
Edward Albee
#45. A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.
Russell Baker
#47. I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.
Aaron Sorkin
#48. In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.
August Wilson
#49. I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, 'Well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct.'
Adam Rapp
#50. You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.
Robert Duvall
#51. I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.
Jean Kerr
#52. When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That's my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.
David Suchet
#53. Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.
Susanna Clarke
#54. If a playwright is funny, the English look for a serious message, and if he's serious, they look for a joke.
Sacha Guitry
#55. As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.
Tony Kushner
#56. A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
Arthur Miller
#57. 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.
Beth Henley
#58. Any part I do is a marriage of the words - what the playwright or producer or show runner's vision is - to how I would play it. It took me a while to get rid of 'Oh, they want it this way, so I'm going to do it how they want it.'
Christian Camargo
#59. I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.
Liev Schreiber
#60. The truth is not simply what you think it is; it is also the circumstances in which it is said, and to whom, why, and how it is said.
Vaclav Havel
#61. The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
Robert Anderson
#62. I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
Orson Scott Card
#63. It's a lucky circumstance when you get to usher in new work, because you are able to ask the playwright and the director (who in a new work is always in dialogue with the playwright) an unlimited amount of questions.
Gideon Glick
#64. Every man thinks God is on his side. The rich and powerful know he is. Jean Anouilh, French dramatist and playwright
George Washington
#65. Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.
Phyllis McGinley
#66. Being a playwright of any race is difficult, and Lord knows it gets more difficult the further you get from the middle of the road. I don't know what kind of magic my mojo is working, but it's working.
Suzan-Lori Parks
#67. What shouldn't you do if you're a young playwright? Don't bore the audience! I mean, even if you have to resort to totally arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it'll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.
Tennessee Williams
#68. What does a painter do? You get a painting, you put some intent and passion and emotion into these things, and hope the people will receive it. Same as a playwright. It's art.
Creed Bratton
#69. In April, 1954, March published The Bad Seed, a novel about a sociopathic, homicidal eight-year-old girl. It became a phenomenal success, a bestseller that would be adapted for the stage by the renowned playwright Maxwell Anderson, and later made into a movie - twice.
Richard Rubin
#70. Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.
Lewis Black
#71. I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.
August Strindberg
#72. A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor.
Eric Bentley
#73. It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.
Laura Wade
#74. It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
John Lithgow
#75. Edward Albee, our greatest living playwright, American treasure, who watched Doubt from beginning to end and loved it, all while a bored B. J. Novak slept on him.
Mindy Kaling
#76. I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much.
Tracy Letts
#77. I didn't have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.
Pearl Cleage
#78. I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.
Colin Callender
#80. The word "robot" comes from the 1920 Czech play R.U.R. by playwright Karel Capek ("robot" means "drudgery" in the Czech language and "labor" in Slovak).
Michio Kaku
#81. Playwrights are naturally wary and protective - God, who's more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately.
Gene Saks
#82. I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I'm surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don't think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don't think anybody does.
Tony Kushner
#83. One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer.
Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa
#84. For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.
Jackson Katz
#85. 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.
Anton Chekhov
#86. The playwright's rendition of Abraham Lincoln remembers a pitiful little paddlewheel he saw that he could only generate steam to EITHER blow the ship's whistle OR move the wheel. Just as the little ship could not do both, Lincoln fears that very few can actually think and speak at the same time.
Norman Corwin
#87. You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can't make a living.
Sherwood Anderson
#89. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn't matter.
Adam Rapp
#90. Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone.
Jules Fisher
#91. If you have two or three real passions, don't feel like you have to pick and choose between them. Don't discard. Keep all your passions in your life. This is something I learned from the playwright Steven Tomlinson.
Austin Kleon
#92. I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'
Kirsten Vangsness
#93. A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.
Timothy West
#94. One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.
Vivien Leigh
#95. I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star.
Sam Shepard
#96. To me, the job of a playwright is to explore and bring to light our lives. You can't hold back; you have to give in to this. Sometimes, you say things people don't want to hear.
Ted Lange
#97. On the day the world is blown up, the playwright whose show opened the night before will be leafing past the news section of the Times to find his review
as he ascends through the stratosphere, oblivious.
Arthur Miller
#98. Sophokles is a playwright fascinated in general by people who say no, people who resist compromise, people who make stumbling blocks of themselves, like Antigone or Ajax.
Aeschylus
#99. I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.
Greta Gerwig
#100. The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.
Beau Willimon
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