Playwright Quotes

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay. (Arthur Miller)
A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant. View quote
Wilson Mizner
A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute. View quote
Terence Rattigan
If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps. View quote
James Thurber
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square. View quote
Alex Cox
One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays. View quote
Vivien Leigh
Our Playwright may show; In some fifth Act what this wild drama means. View quote
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door." The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act?" Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?" View quote
Al Gore
A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage. View quote
Edward Albee
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. View quote
Noël Coward
William Congreve is the only sophisticated playwright England has produced; and like Shaw, Sheridan, and Wilde, his nearest rivals, he was brought up in Ireland. (Kenneth Tynan)
You know, I used to not understand fashion, a lot of it, but I completely understood being a playwright or a screenwriter and suddenly having an actor say your words and making them come to life. That I can understand. Finally, I'm starting to understand this. View quote
Reese Witherspoon
I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories. View quote
Francis Ford Coppola
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. View quote
C. S. Lewis
Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me. View quote
Mindy Kaling
You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by. View quote
Sam Shepard
But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed. View quote
Sherrilyn Kenyon
One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright. View quote
George Jean Nathan
An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut. View quote
George Jean Nathan
You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore. View quote
Robert Duvall
The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play. (Robert Anderson)
If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes. View quote
Brad Dourif
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. View quote
Beth Henley
It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright. View quote
Beth Henley
I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much. View quote
Ellen McLaughlin