Playwright Quotations

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.

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.

I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.

Playwrights are naturally wary and protective - God, who's more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately.

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

If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.

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

I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

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

My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.

I started writing because it was hard to find acting jobs. I didn't like any monologues in auditions, so I started to write my own things. Since then, I have written a couple of shows. I was nominated for playwright of the year for a play I wrote called 'Potential Space.'

You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

You can't be a playwright without believing there's an audience for adventurous work.

I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'

My mother was an actress and a director, as well. And my father was a playwright and poet.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

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

The economics of being a playwright are abysmal. I like to think of the work I do out in Hollywood as a way to actually make a life in the theater easier.

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.

Nothing, I find, has prepared me for the sight of my own characters walking about. A playwright or screenwriter must expect it; a novelist doesn't and naturally concludes that she has gone mad.

Lewis Carroll's marvelous stories evoke a wondrous world and it is important that we ensure enough time for this production to achieve its fullest realization, ... We look forward to continuing to work on this new project with playwright Annie Weisman and composer Michael Friedman and to presenting it in the future.

She was a marvelous playwright who wrote vital, important female characters and vital, important male characters. Like many writers, she drew on personal experiences. But she was also a gifted observer of the human condition.

For three decades the Harold & Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust has been a fervent supporter of the American playwright. It is vital that we continue to support those writers who relate the ongoing American saga for the stage. This award brings the appropriate recognition to the important role the playwright serves in American Arts & Letters.

For millions of women and men around the world, the playwright Eve Ensler is a beloved figure. She represents the epitome of the politically engaged artist, someone who uses her creative brilliance to illuminate injustice and give voice to the voiceless.

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

His name has been on the list for a couple of years now. He's America's greatest living playwright and one of the playwrights of modern times.

My plays aren't stylistically the same. Just being an African-American woman playwright on Broadway is experimental.

Like the city of Venice, everything has been said about August Wilson, but what demands repetition is that he's arguably the finest playwright of the second half of the last century. And that with Lorraine Hansberry, he is responsible for making the real black experience part of the American consciousness.

Our Playwright may show/ In some fifth Act what this wild drama means.

Our season is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Miller, and he said his favorite playwright was Ibsen.

When ghosts begin resolving realistic plays, you can be sure the playwright has failed to master his material, ... The Piano Lesson.

the definitive interpreter of the works of playwright Eugene O'Neill.

Written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Donald Margulies and directed by Sundance nominee James Ponsoldt, 'The End of the Tour' is a terrific film, among the year's best with its two-man tarantella of wall-to-wall talk - and I watched it through my fingers as though it were Mad Max.

When I was a playwright earlier in my career - my senior project in high school was my first produced play - I used to put on the title page: 'A tragedy with laughs.'

Being a playwright is like the equivalent of doing a jigsaw puzzle that has 1,500 pieces, and it's a jigsaw of a blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

Being a playwright is lot of work. There are a lot more venues around here this year than years ago.

Being a playwright of any race is difficult, and Lord knows it gets more difficult the further you get from the middle of the road. I don't know what kind of magic my mojo is working, but it's working.

Role models are huge, ... I started out writing poetry and might never have believed I could have a life as a playwright if Paula Vogel hadn't plucked me out and said 'you can do this for life.'

With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.

The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create 'characters' in a 'setting' who speak 'dialogue' encased in 'scenes.' Most importantly, you - like the playwright - have an 'audience.'

We didn't go out of our way to baby Racine scripts. Every piece chosen can stand on its own merit, without regard to where the playwright lives.

This sentimental comedy by the Soviet playwright Aleksei Arbuzov is said to have had a great success in its own country. So do fringed lamp shades.

In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.

I'm a playwright and a novelist and a journalist. It's a weird Salinger-Mailer-Miller combination. When the series starts, he--like a lot of liberal New Yorkers--are starting to realize something is very wrong in the gay community. My investigation into what becomes called AIDS is going to be a big part of the show.

I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.

I'm happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was - but it's almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with 'Angels,' and it still generates income for me, but it's not enough for me to live on and have health insurance.

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

I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

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

I know a playwright with a forty-thousand-dollar house in Beverly and he's miserable.

I lived with a playwright for 12 years,

He's the most successful American comedy playwright ever. And this is such a damned good funny play - and this time of year you need as many laughs as you can get.

A playwright . . . is . . . the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's gre

A playwright who limits himself - or is limited - to a handful of characters is forced to concentrate on the essentials of the situation that he has chosen to portray.

Any part I do is a marriage of the words - what the playwright or producer or show runner's vision is - to how I would play it. It took me a while to get rid of 'Oh, they want it this way, so I'm going to do it how they want it.'

Any woman who is a playwright is already a feminist.

The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

It's absolutely stunning and upsetting to hear. He's certainly one of the major playwrights that America has produced. The only small blessing is that he was able to complete this incredible cycle of plays. He set himself a task some 20 years ago and completed it in a way that no other American playwright ever has, including Eugene O'Neill.

There's a playwright named S.M. Berryman, Sam Berryman, who wrote these kinds of social comedies. They are actually extremely sharp and still quite provocative.

I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.

I do think it is a service to the playwright and that's a service to the theater indirectly.

It's very hard to be a playwright because it's very competitive.

But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed

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

There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.

As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or another I've been influenced by every single play I've ever experienced.

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

I never wanted to be a playwright.

I'm not a playwright.