Playwright Quotes

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.'

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

Well we took it apart scene by scene. We examined every sentence, every full stop, every comma. He has a most wonderful eye for detail, Roman, and you know, he's a very good artist.

No, I can't write treatments, I think there's a danger with treatments. That you... you write out your first excitement and enthusiasm in a prose treatment.

It's a terrific... you can't put it down. So I phoned him back and I said I'd love to do it. I went over to Paris for a meeting, and we just talked very generally about the approach.

I went straight in. Fade in, one... whatever. He's playing the piano in the radio station.

I mean he's a very famous director... they're not going to put their... and he's very tough, he doesn't like interference at all, so he kept them at bay.

He's very concealed, Polanski. We became very close friends, but I don't think I ever saw him drop his guard. I didn't see him upset or anything like that, we just did the work.

Easier to climb up, than to just hang on.

So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o'clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.

Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.

Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own.

All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'.

When they speak, dead frogs fall out of their mouths.

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

To those whose God is honor; only disgrace is a sin.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

Strength was the virtue of paganism; obedience is the virtue of Christianity.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Smiles are the language of love.

Purity is the feminine, truth the masculine of honor.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.