Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero.
One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.
Time is short, life is short, there's a lot to know. So I skip the entertainers in the newspaper now. I just haven't got time.
You should not translate for more than two hours at a time. After that, you lose your edge, the language becomes clumsy, rigid.
The idea that being human and having rights are equivalent - that rights are inherent - is unintelligible in a Darwinian world.
Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based.
It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.
The printed word is no longer as in demand as when I was of the age of pupils or even at the age of the teachers teaching them.
I think that the present is worth attention, one shouldn't sacrifice it to future conceptions of, of this future or that future.
I write scenes - often quite long scenes - mainly because I still get seduced into writing six lines where one and a half will do.
If you took away everything in the world that had to be invented, there'd be nothing left except a lot of people getting rained on.
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
No matter how imperfect things are, if you've got a free press everything is correctable, and without it everything is concealable.
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
I am not somebody who meets a man or a woman somewhere and feels like that is an incredible character that I must write into a play.
He's never known anything like it! But then, he has never known anything to write home about, so this is nothing to write home about.
I'm a conservative kind of person. I don't think rightwing is quite the same thing. But I acknowledge my conservatism of temperament.
A 'human right' is, by definition, timeless. It cannot adhere to some societies and not others, at some times and not at other times.
I don't write at the library, because I smoke when I work or would like the possibility of a smoke. Also, I need to be at my own desk.
My scripts are possibly too talkative. Sometimes I watch a scene I've written, and occasionally I think, 'Oh, for God's sake, shut up.'
Chekhov was capable of casually tossing off deplorable comments in his letters, combined with a very modern anger against anti-Semitism.
The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.
I began writing for theater, and maybe because of that I've always thought of myself as a theater writer who does work in film sometimes.
Rosencrantz: Shouldn't we be doing something--constructive? Guildenstern: What did you have in mind? ... A short, blunt human pyramid...?
My life feels, week to week, incomplete to the level of being pointless if I am not in preparation for the next play or, ideally, into it.
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?
Writing a new play shouldn't be seen as a mystery belonging to a priesthood, but as a challenge, a technical challenge, just to get into it.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.
You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.
Life in a box is better than no life at all, I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking: Well, at least I'm not dead.
It is no light matter to put in jeopardy a single life when it is the very singularity of each life which underpins the idea of a just society.
We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
To say that it is without pace, point, focus, interest, drama, wit or originality is to say simply that it does not happen to be my cup of tea.
Very often in Chekhov, where he exhibits a little bit of human behavior that you recognize as true, you give a little laugh. It's like a reflex.
I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.
I think I give the impression of being a romantic, and I think inside I'm quite severe. But some might say they had the opposite impression of me.
Despite the digital age, there is a very large number of venues and spaces that are looking for plays, and many of them are looking for new plays.
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.
The thing about talking about human rights is that when one bears in mind the sharp end of it, one does not want to worry too much about semantics.
Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.
"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours.
Let me get it straight. Your father was king. You were his only son. Your father dies. You are of age. Your uncle becomes king." "Yes." "Unorthodox.
I'm so grateful to grab hold of something that wants to be a play. It doesn't happen very often. I don't have unwritten plays waiting for their turn.
If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.
On Broadway, only the fire doors separate you from the sidewalk and you're lucky if the sound of a police car doesn't rip the envelope twice a night.
Although I don't examine myself in this respect, I would say, off the top of my head, that I've come to acknowledge my Czechness more as I get older.
I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
You can't go around chasing your own plays and showing up every time somebody does one somewhere. You just cross your fingers and hope that they're OK.