Playwright Quotes

What does a painter do? You get a painting, you put some intent and passion and emotion into these things, and hope the people will receive it. Same as a playwright. It's art.

My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.

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

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

The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others.

To write a play one must be born a playwright. Otherwise, you're starting at a huge disadvantage.

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

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.

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

A play has two authors, the playwright and the actor.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

I've been many kinds of writers in my career: novelist; tele-playwright; short story writer. As a high-school student, I wrote amateur pieces for fanzines, and I've written for Hollywood.

I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.

Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.

I've always been a fan of reading art catalogues from exhibitions, and plays, and I've worked with a surrealist German playwright, Heiner Müller.

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

I'm an American playwright. Tennessee Williams got in all our DNA.

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.

Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.

There's no American playwright after 1945 who wasn't profoundly affected - who didn't have their DNA changed by Tennessee Williams.

The British playwright Nina Raine is one of her generation's most promising talents.

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

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.

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

I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.

Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.

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

[Anton] Chekhov is the most produced playwright in the world after Shakespeare, and most of the people in my sort of audience would have seen at least one of his plays.

One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer.

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

I am not a playwright. A playwright would take "Antigone" and hit it a few clouts and knock it out of shape and restructure it. My versioning was strictly verbal.

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

You can make a killing as a playwright in America, but you can't make a living.

I do come from a theater background, where the playwright is optimal and king and you have to serve the playwright. So I am, of course, a huge fan of scripted everything.

To me, the job of a playwright is to explore and bring to light our lives. You can't hold back; you have to give in to this. Sometimes, you say things people don't want to hear.

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

As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

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 set of antecedents.

One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape, yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It's quite embarrassing, it's quite unpleasant, it's quite awkward.

Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.

I never wanted to be a playwright.

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.

...and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me...