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Quotes by Playwright
"If you can go through life without experiencing pain you probably haven't been born yet."
"You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy."
"Take care of him. And make him feel important. And if you can do that, you'll have a happy and wonderful marriage. Like two out of every ten couples."
"Sudden money is going from zero to two hundred dollars a week. The rest doesn't count."
"Sports is the only entertainment where, no matter how many times you go back, you never know the ending."
"Money brings some happiness. But after a certain point, it just brings more money."
"I love living. I have some problems with my life, but living is the best thing they've come up with so far."
"Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life."
"Nathan Lane always wanted to play Oscar. When he came in the first day, he already knew his lines. He said he'd known them since he was 18."
"He must be independent and brave, and sure of himself and of the importance of his work, because if he isn't he will never survive the scorching blasts of derision that will probably greet his first efforts."
"To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool."
"We all come from our own little planets. That's why we're all different. That's what makes life interesting."
Life,
"Our memories are independent of our wills. It is not so easy to forget."
"Remember that when you meet your antagonist, to do everything in a mild agreeable manner. Let your courage be keen, but, at the same time, as polished as your sword."
"Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day."
"Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible."
"Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics."
"Death's a debt; his mandamus binds all alike- no bail, no demurrer."
"Fertilizer does no good in a heap, but a little spread around works miracles all over."
"A bumper of good liquor will end a contest quicker than justice, judge, or vicar."
"For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!"
"He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
"I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it."
"I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere."
"I'm called away by particular business - but I leave my character behind me."
7
"Modesty is a quality in a lover more praised by the women than liked."
"A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in."
"There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so."
"You write with ease to show your breeding, but easy writing's curst hard reading."
"You know it is not my interest to pay the principal, or my principal to pay the interest."
"Won't you come into the garden? I would like my roses to see you."
"To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief."
"'Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion."
"My valor is certainly going, it is sneaking off! I feel it oozing out as it were, at the palms of my hands!"
"There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature."
"Pity those who nature abuses; never those who abuse nature."
"There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy."
7
"The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed."
"The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed."
"The glorious uncertainty of the law was a thing well known and complained of, by all ignorant people, but all learned gentleman considered it as its greatest excellency."
"That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously."
"Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play."
"I didn't go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer."
"I feel like I've never had a home, you know? I feel related to the country, to this country, and yet I don't know exactly where I fit in... There's always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself."
"I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write."
"Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence, you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side."
"You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by."
"Democracy's a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it's no longer democracy, is it? It's something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
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