Top 81 Quotes About Playwrights
#1. 'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, not like fodder for some machine.
Terrence McNally
#2. Let us freely walk in the countryside, like a horse peacefully walking towards sunset without any particular purpose!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#3. You know, most good playwrights write seven good plays and then something happens and after that they're crap.
Sarah Kane
#5. If there's a spirit world why don't the ghosts of dead artists get together and inhibit bad playwrights from tormenting first-nighters?
Gertrude Atherton
#6. Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.
Janet Malcolm
#7. I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.
Sebastian Stan
#8. I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do.
Edward Albee
#9. Grab what you can and fight your way to a lifeboat.' Everyone associated with the slow printed word is fast becoming the Great Crested Newt of the culture. First it was the poets, the playwrights, then the novelists. Veteran newspapermen are next.
Marisha Pessl
#10. Playwrights are the most gregarious writers - to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers.
Katori Hall
#11. Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.
Meredith Willson
#12. People like Frank Zappa and Bryan Ferry knew we could pick and choose from the history of music, stick things together looking for friction and energy. They were more like playwrights; they invented characters and wrote a life around them.
Brian Eno
#13. The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
Robertson Davies
#14. The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.
Sarah Ruhl
#15. In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#16. There are so many remarkable playwrights working right now, that I see everything I can. Annie Baker is a genius, I'll see anything she writes. The same for Lynn Nottage, Cynthia Hopkins, and Lisa D'Amour. Anything they've got going on, I'll go see.
Lucy Alibar
#17. Life is the art of finding or building a bridge with a great determination every time you come across a precipice!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#18. No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.
Lajos Egri
#19. Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Twyla Tharp
#20. 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
#21. I've taken [acting] class with Larry Moss, who's more kind of in the theater world, so he's really educated me about playwrights.
Eva Mendes
#22. Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus.
Peter Ustinov
#23. When you think about it, what other playwrights are there besides O'Neill, Tennessee and me?
Mae West
#24. 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.
Alan Bennett
#25. Everybody lives in this world, except lovers! They live in an isolated small place called 'You and I' planet!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#26. The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.
Nelson Algren
#27. When you cannot love or hate anymore, then where is the charm of life?
Arthur Schnitzler
#28. In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
Robertson Davies
#29. I'm not one of those playwrights who says, 'Show up, hit your marks, and don't talk to me!' I always want to hear from the other artists involved, whether it's the director, the lighting tech, or the actors.
Pearl Cleage
#30. By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
Peter Ustinov
#31. There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.
Edward Albee
#32. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.
Stella Adler
#33. I think a lot of playwrights have a script in their bottom drawer that hopefully no one will ever see about a bunch of young people sharing a flat and getting up to crazy stuff.
Laura Wade
#34. As far as dramas are concerned, it's considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand.
Ethel Merman
#35. 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
#36. In 2005, I got an email from Belarus Free Theatre. They were emailing playwrights in America and England announcing their existence and saying they would like support from us. I wrote back and asked if they wanted us to visit. They said, 'Yes, we'd love that.'
Tom Stoppard
#37. Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.
Yasmina Reza
#38. As playwrights, as poets, we have to look to ourselves, listen to our guts for the final answers about what changes to make. Everyone has advice about how to end your play differently. And it's not about right or wrong. At the end of the day, it's your baby and you know what's best.
Stephen Karam
#39. Tomes on the meaning of life. Poets and playwrights were
John Dickson
#40. Tennessee Williams, one of my favorite playwrights, [lived] down there. You always heard about the Keys and how amazing they are and, well, it's like a highway with some bars on it.
John Leguizamo
#41. I am very aware that playwrights, particularly good ones, have a intention for everything they write. Language and punctuation is used specifically, and most of the time actors can find wonderful clues about character in the rhythm and cadence of the language used.
Laura Linney
#42. A man without courage is a boat in a frozen lake! Get rid of your fears!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#43. Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.
J.J. Abrams
#44. San Francisco has long been a leader in the arts, nurturing generations of painters, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and performing artists and innovators of every kind.
Gavin Newsom
#45. I have no great faith in women's plays. They always seem to me to lack precisely that which women lack, viz: testicles.
George H. Boker
#46. Little minds try to solve the matters through violence and darkness; great minds try to solve the matters through love and light!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#47. No day is an ordinary day; all days are extraordinary, because life itself is extraordinary!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#48. I just feel like, for whatever reason, female playwrights don't really ask me to do their plays. Nothing would make me happier than finding the sisterhood, but I can't make them.
Anna D. Shapiro
#49. Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.
Arthur Miller
#51. We are playwrights in that we spontaneously compose and direct dialogue, acting out various roles of a nurturer, an authority, or a character from a client's life.
Jeffrey A. Kottler
#52. 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?
Alfred Lunt
#53. I've always liked texts that you immediately understand. I suppose the playwrights who really speak to me are Edward Bond, Joe Orton and Harold Pinter. I've been in six different Pinter productions - I love the clarity of his language. He has this way of using words - there's a thrill to them.
Kenneth Cranham
#54. Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.
Terrence McNally
#55. It is winter time! Feed the birds! Teach your children to feed the birds! Request your neighbour to feed the birds! Encourage your friends to feed the birds!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#56. The classical writers ... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
Timothy West
#57. I know too many playwrights, or would-be playwrights, or would-have-been playwrights, that are around my age, who were bitter or have gone to something else because they got such a raw deal from critics, and some are quite wonderful writers.
Jennifer Tipton
#58. Like most playwrights, I hate talkbacks with a passion that can burn a hole through hell.
Katori Hall
#59. The first job I got was this TV job in this show called 'The Unusuals.' Then I did a play called 'Slipping,' and at the same time I was rehearsing another play at Playwrights Horizons, and that kind of snowballed into a bunch of plays.
Adam Driver
#60. With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.
Athol Fugard
#61. When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.
J.G. Ballard
#62. Some of the greatest works of theater, from Chekov's work to modern playwrights', consist of just a few people in a room with no one leaving.
Adam Rapp
#63. Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.
Lynn Nottage
#64. Painters
and storytellers, including poets and playwrights and historians, they are the justices of the Supreme Court of Good and Evil, of which I am now a member, and to which you may belong someday!
Kurt Vonnegut
#65. The world may not care about you! Cope with this fact! Stand strong like a rock! Keep walking; the road to happiness will mysteriously appear before you!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#66. I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television.
Terry Teachout
#67. You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope, which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist, which quite a lot of playwrights, especially playwrights younger than me, have become guilty of.
Tony Kushner
#68. I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.
Mos Def
#72. I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.
Lusia Strus
#73. I'm no longer going to play thugs or debauched cops that I can't possibly make complex characters. I'm bigger than that. I owe too much to too many good people at the Goodman, Arena and Playwrights Horizons.
Isaiah Washington
#74. Like the playwrights of the Absurd, Woolrich recognized that a senseless story best mirrors a senseless existence.
Francis M. Nevins Jr.
#75. What the commands of mathematicians, God, and playwrights have in common seems to be this, that the mere act of speaking suffices to bring about the truth of what is said.
Alfred Mollin
#76. Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.
Peter Shaffer
#77. I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.
Orlando Bloom
#78. Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.
Israel Horovitz
#79. 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.
Upton Sinclair
#80. The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights
in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. I am always looking for what piece, what artists, what playwrights, what directors, what subject matter is going to catalyze an audience.
Diane Paulus
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