Famous quotes by Playwrights

"Our only competition in the theater is boredom, because if I'm bored with a play, if I'm revolted by a play on stage, with the Broadway prices, especially today, I'm going to walk out and not come back and pay that price again"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"It's always such a joy that you wake up in the morning and there's work to do"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"In no instance is there to be a musical or opera of Inherit the Wind because it doesn't sing. It's an intellectual play"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"If you're going to make a musical, don't cartoon it from the play. Make it better than the play. Have a reason for making it sing"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"I think enthusiasm is the answer to passionate writing"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"All experience helps when you write"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"A play is a passion"

Jerome Lawrence, Playwright

"That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you'll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed"

Beth Henley, Playwright

"Somehow I got to be one of five or six actors that the directors would use as guinea pigs at this directing colloquium, where people pay to listen to and watch the directors direct"

Beth Henley, Playwright

"Some really good things kind of swing both ways, and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful, and funny"

Beth Henley, Playwright

"Plays are so much more special if they've never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production"

Beth Henley, Playwright

"Part of that is that New York has proved to be too much fun for me to live and work; I love New York so much"

Beth Henley, Playwright

"Without alienation, there can be no politics"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"You cannot catch a child's spirit by running after it; you must stand still and, for love, it will soon itself return"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"The closer a man approaches tragedy the more intense is his concentration of emotion upon the fixed point of his commitment, which is to say the closer he approaches what in life we call fanaticism"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You'll never get out of the jungle that way"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"If I see an ending, I can work backward"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"If I have any justification for having lived, it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"I'm the end of the line; absurd and appalling as it may seem, serious New York theater has died in my lifetime"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theater, or the play-but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"I think it's a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one's self"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"I love her too, but our neuroses just don't match"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

"I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you coming through some door"

Arthur Miller, Playwright

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