Playwright Quotes · Page 6

I can write better plays than any living danced, and dance better than any living playwright.

— George M. Cohan

I'm one of those lazy actors; I like to take what the playwright wrote and work with that.

— Cherry Jones

I took a page from [the playwright] Wendy Wasserstein's book. She said 'I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist.'

— Sarah Jessica Parker

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as…

— Beth Henley

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to…

— Vivien Leigh

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

— Timothy West

The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.

— Timothy West

If a playwright is funny, the English look for a serious message, and if he's serious, they look for a joke.

— Sacha Guitry

Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school.…

— Mindy Kaling

It's a lucky circumstance when you get to usher in new work, because you are able to ask the playwright and the…

— Gideon Glick

“Damn everything but the circus!. . .The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop…

— E.E. Cummings

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the…

— Russell Baker

If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act…

— Brenda Ueland

Paris is the playwright's delight. New York is the home of directors. London, however, is the actor's city, the only one in…

— Orson Welles

The psychological detective story in "Equus" made Peter Shaffer's name as a playwright. But it was his next play, "Amadeus," that cemented…

— Bob Mondello

I love television, and my love for it has made me curious about writing it. It feels like television's moving toward something…

— Branden Jacobs-Jenkins

I learned from the Macarturos. I had never been at a table with a labor organizer and a playwright and a performance…

— Sandra Cisneros

Today we can say that at last the director writes the film. The image--its plastic composition and the way it is set…

— Andre Bazin

By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that…

— Arthur Miller

Being on a film set is like being in tech forever. In theater, when you finally finish rehearsing, you go onstage and…

— Tony Kushner

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said…

— Edward Albee

I, too, am deeply concerned with an overarching idea that dramaturgs are now authors . . .. I am not taking the…

— Dana Rosemary Scallon

Dancing insists we take up space, and though it has no set direction, we go there together. Dance is dangerous, joyous, sexual,…

— Eve Ensler

More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention…

— Mel Gussow

I want to be a playwright the way people are bank tellers. I want to keep doing it and have it go…

— Richard Greenberg

“The famous playwright once said, "To sleep, perchance to dream." But I say, "Why wait until we're asleep?”

— D. L. Silverman

Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our…

— Janet Malcolm

I became a playwright and screenwriter. Italian-Americans were my particular specialty. I liked the way they talked. There was something free in…

— John Patrick Shanley

I'm lucky enough to say my day job is acting. I cut my teeth as a theater actor and playwright in New…

— Christopher Denham

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.

— Tom Stoppard

My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite…

— John Mahoney

I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.

— Edward Albee

I grew up doing theatre and spent a long time as a playwright. I still think very visually when I write.

— Libba Bray

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

— Alex Cox

I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain…

— Edward Albee

I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different…

— Tony Kushner

Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

— Edward Albee

Not everyone is capable of madness; and of those lucky enough to be capable, not many have the courage for it.

— August Strindberg

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

— Arthur Miller

Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society. The greatest playwrights are moralists.

— Yasmina Reza