Playwright Quotes

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.

Little Christian Bale. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid, and I re-watched it not too long ago, and my jaw just hit the floor. The whole time I was like, "Who wrote this? This is unbelievable." And then the credits came up at the end and it was Tom Stoppard, my favorite playwright. It's just an amazing piece of writing.

Malcolm X is a person who has inspired - he has been the muse of several generations of black cultural workers, artists, poets, playwrights.

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.

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.

I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.

Playwrights are the most gregarious writers - to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers.

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.

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.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

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.

As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.

What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence . . .. And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well.

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.

In this land of unlimited opportunity, a place where, to paraphrase Woody Allen, any man or woman can realize greatness as a patient or as a doctor, we have only one commercial American filmmaker who consistently speaks with his own voice. That is Woody Allen, gag writer, musician, humorist, philosopher, playwright, stand-up comic, film star, film writer and film director.

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?

When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in.

I’ve spent too many years explaining who and what I am repeatedly, so as of this moment I officially secede from both races. I plan to start my own separate nation. Because I am half Ojibway and half Caucasian, we will be called the Occasions. And of course, since I’m founding the new nation, I will be a Special Occasion.

During the shooting of a scene the director’s eye has to catch even the minutest detail. But this does not mean glaring concentratedly at the set. While the cameras are rolling, I rarely look directly at the actors, but focus my gaze somewhere else. By doing this I sense instantly when something isn’t right. Watching something does not mean fixing your gaze on it, but being aware of it in a natural way. I believe this is what the medieval Noh playwright and theorist Zeami meant by ‘watching with a detached gaze.’

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.

An excess of development can undermine the most ephemeral but distinctive tool a writer possesses: authorial voice. A writer's voice is as individual and marked as a thumbprint, and is a playwright's truest imprimatur. It is as innate as breathing, and can be as unique as any genetic code. By its very singular nature, it is seldom born in the act of collaboration. True authorial voice always pre-dates the first rehearsal of a text. And it is - and will always be - an author's most distinguishing and valuable feature.

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.

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.

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.

Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.

Love is two minds without a single thought.

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.

My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.

As far as dramas are concerned, it's considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand

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.

I ended up becoming a playwright because you can be grammatically incorrect: people speaking in bad poetry or people attempting to speak well and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. The whole imperfection of it suddenly felt freeing to me.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door." The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?" Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?

If music be the food of love, play on.

You don't love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.

I am. I think. I will.

Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love.

There have always been dreamers. Men and women who catch a glimpse of something beyond themselves who dare to reach for goals and visions. .. Yet no earthly dreamer can match the greatest of them all, the Dreamer who died on the cross to make His dream a reality. John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the Word." The literal meaning of logos, the original Greek term translated as "Word," is idea, thought or blueprint. It is an ancient Greek theatrical term describing the work of a playwright as he conceives, or dreams up, the plot of a play. So we could say, "In the beginning was the dream".

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

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.

... actors of the first water are not more plentiful than playwrights of genius.

My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.

The nation which once held the creed that greatness is achieved by production, is now told that it is achieved by squalor.

Each religion is a brave guess at the authorship of Hamlet. Yet, as far as the play goes, does it make any difference whether Shakespeare or Bacon wrote it? Would it make any difference to the actors if their parts happened out of nothingness, if they found themselves acting on the stage because of some gross and unpardonable accident? Would it make any difference if the playwright gave them the lines or whether they composed them themselves, so long as the lines were properly spoken? Would it make any difference to the characters if 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was really a dream?

Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

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.

I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.