Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage. — Edward Albee
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant. — Wilson Mizner
Playwrights are like men who have been dining for a month in an Indian restaurant. After eating curry night after night, they deny the existence of asparagus. — Peter Ustinov
A playwright has a responsibility in his society not to aid it, or comfort it, but to comment and criticize it. — Edward Albee
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to. — T. S. Eliot
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull. — Rod Serling
For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence. — Wallace Shawn
In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born. — Constantin Stanislavski
I provide the bricks and mortar with the words and situations - the director and the actors and the designers build the house. — Eric Bogosian
A stage play requires very different craft from a book, fiction or otherwise, and ditto from a screenplay. — Dirk Benedict
God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny. — Garrison Keillor
The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost. — Arthur Miller
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically. — Timothy West
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. — Martha Graham
Short Playwright Quotes
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it. — Bertolt Brecht
Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself. — Wole Soyinka
When you hit a wall – of your own imagined limitations – just kick it in. — Sam Shepard
I think the job of the artist is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget. — Arthur Miller
If you have a good idea, open your mouth and say something else. — Keith Johnstone
You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you. — Robert Anton Wilson
No time to grieve for roses when the forests are burning. — Zbigniew Herbert
It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact that everything is fundamentally sick and sad. — Thomas Bernhard
Life is only limited by our prejudices. Destroy them, and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself. — Mina Loy
Every child has the capacity to be everything. — Doris Lessing
Playwright Image Quotes
Drama Play Quotes
Have you ever played ping pong up against a wall? You get exhausted a lot quicker than playing against someone. It's the same with getting angry. If you keep getting angry on your own, all that anger will just come back to you. — Taeyang
We are all equal children before our mother; and India asks each one of us, in whatsoever role we play in the complex drama of nation-building, to do our duty with integrity, commitment and unflinching loyalty to the values enshrined in our Constitution. — Pranab Mukherjee
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading. — Igor Stravinsky
Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie. — John Lahr
I went to drama school at NYU for serious acting. So I was doing Chekov and Sam Shepard plays. — Casey Wilson
Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops. — George P. Baker
An actor is looking for conflict. Conflict is what creates drama. We are taught to avoid trouble [so] actors don't realize they must go looking for it. Plays are written about...the extraordinary, the unusual, the climaxes. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance. — Michael Shurtleff
I only really started to go to plays and to be interested in drama 20 years ago when as an artist I was already well-rounded. I think I'm more disciplined today. — Pete Townshend
I was always a drama queen. I remember playing in the kitchen, trying to get my mom to think I was dead and call the police. When she didn't, I would cry. I was always theatrical. I don't think any of my relatives are surprised. — Amy Lee
Although pretend play is important, it is still the means to an end, not the end itself. Do not make the mistake of thinking a contrived, pretend drama can substitute for real interpersonal comfort in dealing with important emotional issues. — Stanley Greenspan
Playwriting Quotes
I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors. — Edward Gordon Craig
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play. — Sam Shepard
I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky. — Orson Scott Card
I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright. — Liev Schreiber
Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard. — Arthur Miller
Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along. — Edward Albee
I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays. — Zoe Kazan
I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies. — Zoe Kazan
Feydeau's one rule of playwriting:
Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B.
Knock Knock.
Enter Character B. — John Guare
My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me. — Valorie Curry
Stage Play Quotes
Who is it that loves and who that suffers? He alone stages a play with Himself; who exists save Him? The individual suffers because he perceives duality. It is duality which causes all sorrow and grief. Find the One everywhere and in everything and there will be an end to pain and suffering. — Anandamayi Ma
The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. — Erik Erikson
It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; signifying nothing. — William Shakespeare
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages. — William Shakespeare
Of all the preaching in the world, I hate that preaching which tends to make the hearers laugh, or to move their minds with tickling levity and affect them as stage plays used to, instead of affecting them with a holy reverence for the name of God. — Richard Baxter
If Shakespeare can compare all of life to a stage, maybe it's not odd to believe that part of the play can take place on a basketball court. — Bill Russell
The world of chemical reactions is like a stage, on which scene after scene is ceaselessly played. The actors on it are the elements. — Clemens Winkler
I'm probably never happier than when I'm by myself in the water. What I've worked and sacrificed for is not to be on stage playing music but to surf in some secluded place. It's a grounding element. Waves don't care who you are. — Eddie Vedder
When you see what you're here for, the world begins to mirror your purpose in a magical way. It's almost as if you suddenly find yourself on a stage in a play that was written expressly for you. — Betty Sue Flowers
All this cuddling and kissing on stage these days, well it's all right in football when someone scores a goal, but not when you're playing darts. — Eric Bristow
Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it. — August Strindberg
Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing. — Linda Hogan
What I was utterly convinced of, and still am, is the idea that the only responsibility the free intellectual has is vis-a-vis himself. He is not responsible to either a political party or a ruler. — Tawfiq al-Hakim
Love is the only energy I’ve ever used as a writer. I’ve never written out of anger, although anger has informed love. — Athol Fugard
But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright. — Beth Henley
Steven Alan Green is ONE funny writer ---- Everything I read of yours makes me laugh and think - Not just the kind words about meBut the insights you have for the Comedy racket.You're Barbara Hershey, we are beaches. — Taylor Negron
As lovers, the difference between men and women is that women can love all day long, but men only at times. — W. Somerset Maugham
The terrorist is the one with the small bomb. — Brendan Behan
A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company. — Oscar Wilde
Man is not himself only...He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources...He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. — Mary Hunter Austin
Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing. — Terrence McNally
No matter how successful I become as a playwright, my mother would be thrilled to hear me tell her that I'd just lost twenty pounds, gotten married and become a lawyer. — Wendy Wasserstein
Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists. — Yasmina Reza
I am a playwright. I show What I have seen. In the man markets I have seen how men are traded. That I show, I, the playwright. — Bertolt Brecht
A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience. — David Mamet
Have you ever been so melancholy, that you wanted to fit in the palm of your beloved's hand? And lie there, for fortnights, or decades, or the length of time between stars? In complete silence? — Sarah Ruhl
You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it. — Robert Anton Wilson
It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses. — Peter Shaffer
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows. — John Lithgow
Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit. — Upton Sinclair
Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow. — Thornton Wilder
As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced. — Edward Albee
America's founding Ideal was the principle of individual rights. Nothing more - and nothing less. — Ayn Rand
The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. — Joseph Weizenbaum
I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about. — August Wilson
By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door. — Peter Ustinov
The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors. — Stella Adler
Oftentimes the quality of the light tells the story: the time of day, the weather, whether sun is streaming through the window. It can also help you appreciate what the actor is feeling, what the playwright wants you to feel. Any engineer can put a spot on someone. — Jules Fisher
In Conclusion
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