Inspirational quotes with playwright.
If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.
I am alone this evening, and I am alone because of a cruel twist of fate, a phrase which here means that nothing has happened the way I thought it would. Once I was a content man, with a comfortable home, a successful career, a person I loved very much, and an extremely reliable typewriter, but all of those things have been taken away from me, and now the only trace I have of those happy days is the tattoo on my left ankle. As I sit in this very tiny room, printing these words with a very large pencil, I feel as if my whole life has been nothing but a dismal play, presented just for someone else’s amusement, and that the playwright who invented my cruel twist of fate is somewhere far above me, laughing and laughing at his creation.
Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and--God damn it--died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.
The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.
The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?
That this is really the case was made plain to me by the questions asked me, mostly by young men, about my Canterbury play, The Zeal of Thy House. The action of the play involves a dramatic presentation of a few fundamental Christian dogmas— in particular, the application to human affairs of the doctrine of the Incarnation. That the Church believed Christ to be in any real sense God, or that the eternal word was supposed to be associated in any way with the word of creation; that Christ was held to be at the same time man in any real sense of the word; that the doctrine of the Trinity could be considered to have any relation to fact or any bearing on psychological truth; that the Church considered pride to be sinful, or indeed took notice of any sin beyond the more disreputable sins of the flesh—all these things were looked upon as astonishing and revolutionary novelties, imported into the faith by the feverish imagination of a playwright. I protested in vain against this flattering tribute to my powers of invention, referring my inquirers to the creeds, to the gospels, and to the offices of the Church; I insisted that if my play were dramatic it was so, not in spite of the dogma, but because of it—that, in short, the dogma was the drama. The explanation was, however, not well received; it was felt that if there were anything attractive in Christian philosophy I must have put it there myself.
Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
Life was rich with possibility, or life was possibly rich...She felt incandescent with the news.Cold sun. Jack in the pulpits nosing out of the still-frozen mud. Lotto lay watching the world incrementally wake up. They had been married for seventeen years, she lived in the deepest room in his heart, and sometimes that meant that wife occurred to him before Mathilde, helpmeet before herself, abstraction of her before the physical being. But not now. When she came across the veranda, he saw Mathilde all of the sudden, the dark whip at the center of her, how, so gently, she flicked it and kept him spinning. She put her cold hand on his stomach, which he was sunning to banish the winter's white. 'Vain,' she said. 'An actor in a playwright's hide,' he said. 'I'll never not be vain.''Oh well, it's you,' she said. 'You're desperate for the love of strangers, to be seen.''You see me,' he said. And he heard the echo with his thoughts a minute before and was pleased.'I do,' she said. 'Now please, talk.'She stretched her arms over heads...she looked at him, savoring her own knowing, his unknowing...
If you stay open to the wisdom of your Muse, you may discover you’re a playwright, a sculptor, a kitchen-table comedian, a beacon of creative kindness, or a person who chooses grace over ego and contentment over greed. And in that choice you will create an world of joy within yourself, you’ll truly be an artist of being alive.
Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside-and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said, 'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world“I know what’s happened,” the poet says.
Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all — clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.
Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.
Life is like theatre. Each new day is a new scene with new acts and roles to portray. The sets always change. You come across new dialogue and lines to exchange between others. Scripts are improvised. But the beauty in it is that everyday, you are constantly learning who you are and how others around you are. Express yourself and empathize. It's okay to wear a mask every now and then but remember that you'll eventually meet fellow thespians who will find a way to break down your walls and barriers. Remember another thing: this isn't a dress rehearsal. And God is your ultimate Director. Let Him write your script and call the cuts. Allow Him to provide you with the applause that truly matters. Let Him open up your heart to real self discovery. He is the best playwright that never dies. He lives. And so do you when you learn to let go and step on the stage of life.
An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who’s the better writer?
Once, a few years earlier, Jules had gone to see a play at Ash’s theater, and afterward, during the “talkback,” when the audience asked questions of the playwright and of Ash, who’d directed the production, a woman stood up and said, “This one is for Ms. Wolf. My daughter wants to be a director too. She’s applying to graduate school in directing, but I know very well that there are no jobs, and that she’s probably only going to have her dreams dashed. Shouldn’t I encourage her to do something else, to find some other field she can get into before too much time goes by?” And Ash had said to that mother, “Well, if she’s thinking about going into directing, she has to really, really want it. That’s the first thing. Because if she doesn’t, then there’s no point in putting herself through all of this, because it’s incredibly hard and dispiriting. But if she does really, really want it, and if she seems to have a talent for it, then I think you should tell her, ‘That’s wonderful.’ Because the truth is, the world will probably whittle your daughter down. But a mother never should.
The playwright Edward Albee has characterized [the suddenness of the appearance of fruits and flowers in evolutionary history] as 'that heartbreaking second when it all got together: the sugars and the acids and the ultraviolets, and the next thing you knew there were tangerines and string quartets.
The playwright's rendition of Abraham Lincoln remembers a pitiful little paddlewheel he saw that he could only generate steam to EITHER blow the ship's whistle OR move the wheel. Just as the little ship could not do both, Lincoln fears that very few can actually think and speak at the same time.
First day of your teaching you are to stand at your classroom door and let your students know how happy you are to see them. Stand, I say. Any playwright will tell you that when the actor sits down the play sits down. The best move of all is to establish yourself as a presence and to do it outside in the hallway. Outside, I say. That’s your territory and when you’re out there you’ll be seen as a strong teacher, fearless, ready to face the swarm. That’s what a class is, a swarm. And you’re a warrior teacher. It’s something people don’t think about. Your territory is like your aura, it goes with you everywhere, in the hallways, on the stairs and, assuredly, in the classroom.
I am a playwright who does not write comedies, or tragedies.
But what the measured prose of psychiatrists and the carefully calculated statistics of social scientists rarely capture is the experience of inner struggle. These "significant changes" do not occur automatically. In fact, they must often fight against our resistance. In this sense, midlife is a drama more worthy of a playwright than a scholar. We are characters in the play, caught at the opening of the second act, and we do not know what will happen next.
So, I’m a playwright. In Minneapolis. Which means that I find myself operating in a pretty lefty crowd, most of the time. And most of my energy goes towards arguing with that, and musing about how I really fucking can’t stand Democrats. So I was startled to be reminded of a fact that I’d almost entirely forgotten: I really fucking can’t stand Republicans.
It was our passion for words and our ardent desire to write that drew me and Michael together, and the same that drove us apart.Michael wanted to be a great playwright, like the former master Molière. He had high ambitions and scorned what I wrote as frivolous and feminine.‘All these disguises and duels and abductions,’ he said contemptuously, one day a year or so after our affair began, slapping down the pile of paper covered with my sprawling handwriting. ‘All these desperate love affairs. And you wish me to take you seriously.’‘I like disguises and duels.’ I sat bolt upright on the edge of my bed. ‘Better than those dreary boring plays you write. At least something happens in my stories.’‘At least my plays are about something.’‘My stories are about something too. Just because they aren’t boring doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy.’‘What are they about? Love’ He clasped his hands together near his ear and fluttered his eyelashes.’‘Yes, love. What’s wrong with writing about love? Everyone longs for love.’‘Aren’t there enough love stories in the world without adding to them?‘Isn’t there enough misery and tragedy?’Michael snorted with contempt.‘What’s wrong with wanting to be happy?‘It’s sugary and sentimental.’‘Sugary? I’m not sugary.’ I was so angry that I hurled my shoes at his head.
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