Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You have your words, and I have mine.
Librarians as a race tend to be tedious.
I was an accomplice in my own frustration.
Goodness is nothing in the furnace of art.
Art and literature are my surrogate religions.
You can't always let people do their own thing.
Love is the only doorway from the prison of ourselves.
If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.
What use, after all, is man, if not to teach God His lessons?
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over, does it?
Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It cannot be created.
I think people nowadays do tend to blame their parents for everything.
I think possibly the first film that has music as its leading character.
I think I did have fantasies about being an actor. In fact, I know I did.
My actual childhood, as opposed to my adolescence, was not spent in London.
The rhetoric is the key to the character. It's the verbal music of the piece.
Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it.
A child is born into a world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave.
The devil isn't made by what Mommy says or what Daddy says. The devil is there.
The best of Mozart's works cannot be even slightly rewritten without diminishment.
Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?
The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.
All I ever wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing and then made me mute.
Rehearsing a play is making the word flesh. Publishing a play is reversing the process.
I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.
I was born in Liverpool in England, and I lived there for the first nine years of my life.
But the first published thing I did was a detective story, detective novel, and I did that on my own.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults.
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.
Watching Italian opera, all those male sopranos screeching, stupid fat couples rolling their eyes about. That's not love, it's just rubbish.
And in fact, I think one of the best guides to telling you who you are, and I think children use it all the time for this purpose, is fantasy.
There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.
In London, 'Equus' caused a sensation because it displayed cruelty to horses; in New York, because it allegedly displayed cruelty to psychiatrists.
It's an extraordinary thing about Mozart is that you never tire of him... he never bores me, and he doesn't... not only bore me, that's too strong a word.
I was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household. I don't think I ever had a single discussion with my parents about faith. It was just something gently imposed.
You never quite know what's going to strike your imagination, or something that won't going to leave you alone, not going to leave alone, and this was one for me.
I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.
I'd be willing to bet that any incursion throughout history in which the invading country has proclaimed it is bringing benefits to the conquered is based on a lie.
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.
I've seen the most remarkable thing. It's in the New York Public Library. They've got the original typescript of 'The Importance of Being Earnest' - all four acts of it.
The conquistadors and their followers were very rough people, and they were fixated on gold and silver. They were oblivious to the astonishing achievements of the Inca civilisation.
Look... to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'.
Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.
All my wife has ever taken from the Mediterranean - from that whole vast intuitive culture - are four bottles of Chianti to make into lamps, and two china condiment donkeys labelled Sally and Peppy.
Black Comedy is a farce that is played in the dark, as you know, with the lights full on. It's the Chinese convention of reversing light and dark, and exactly where anybody is at any given moment is the play.
We... our war began September the 3rd 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany, and thereafter the great state of danger in England at that time, with the bombings, necessitated the evacuation of children.
Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people.
I discover what I mean as I write. That can be both terrifically exciting and very dangerous, because when you look at your words later, you wonder, 'Did I really mean that, or am I just making verbal patterns?'
I made, over the years in Cambridge, several very good American friends, and America appeared to me, a land of promise in every sense of that word, a land of freedom from the inhibitions and restrictions that I felt in England.