Famous quotes by Playwrights

"I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actors repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high, I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit"

Richard Foreman, Playwright

"You know very well that unless you're a scientist, it's much more important for a theory to be shapely, than for it to be true"

Christopher Hampton, Playwright

"I have always thought of sophistication as rather a feeble substitute for decadence"

Christopher Hampton, Playwright

"A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate"

Christopher Hampton, Playwright

"I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth"

Christopher Hampton, Playwright

"Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it"

Frank Wedekind, Playwright

"Later we learned that it was one of our own men hanging on the wire. Nobody could do anything for him; two men had already tried to save him, only to be shot themselves"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"Each had defended his own country; the Germans, Germany, the Frenchmen, France; they had done their duty"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"I saw the dead without really seeing them"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"And suddenly, like light in darkness, the real truth broke in upon me; the simple fact of Man, which I had forgotten, which had lain deep buried and out of sight; the idea of community, of unity"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"After that I could never pass a dead man without stopping to gaze on his face, stripped by death of that earthly patina which masks the living soul. And I would ask, Who were you? Where was your home? Who is mourning for you now?"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"The dark is light enough"

Christopher Fry, Playwright

"The prospect of success in achieving our most cherished dream is not without its terrors. Who is more deprived and alone than the man who has achieved his dream?"

Brendan Francis, Playwright

"Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action"

Brendan Francis, Playwright

"At that moment of realization, I knew that I had been blind because I had wished not to see; it was only then that I realised, at last, that all these dead men, French and Germans, were brothers, and I was the brother of them all"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

"The laws of this world are for children"

Frank Wedekind, Playwright

"We thrust our fingers into our ears to stop its moan; but it was no good; the cry cut like a drill into our heads, dragging minutes into hours, hours into years. We withered and grew old between those cries"

Ernst Toller, Playwright

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