Writers Theater Quotes & Sayings

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits. — Vincent H. O'Neil

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

Susie: Hi Calvin! Aren't you excited about going to school? Look at all these great school supplies I got! I love having new notebooks and stuff!
Calvin:All I've got to say is they're not making me learn any foreign languages. If English is good enough for me, then by golly, it's good enough for the rest of the world! Everyone should just speak English or shut up, that's what I say!
Susie: You should maybe check the chemical content of your breakfast cereal. — Bill Watterson

I had been on this improv team at this really great improv theater. It's called iO now. It used to be called Improv Olympic. They have showcases for Lorne Michaels and other writers and people who work at 'SNL' usually about once a year, although I don't know if it always happens. — Vanessa Bayer

Lincoln was "the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, or the difference of color."92 Nor did Lincoln mean — Allen C. Guelzo

After 30 years in the theater, I'm used to having a great amount of control over what I do. But with '24', you place your character's life in the writers' hands, and you have no idea what's going to happen until you're sent the next pages. — Cherry Jones

Miracles happen every day. Not just in remote country villages or at holy sites halfway across the globe, but here, in our own lives. — Deepak Chopra

An ad for cigars appears in 100,000 newspapers; sales of that brand increase by 3% for a short time thereafter. A new play receives a viciously negative review in a theatrical journal that prints 500 copies; the playwright shoots himself. Who's the better writer? — Jason Lutes

The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happen, even the writers. — Alan Cumming

I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more. — Garry Hynes

Women are the essential part of the theater but the writers are not writing about women. I think they're too perplexed about the whole female situation probably. — Bette Davis

Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me. — Rachel Bloom

The answer is good things only happen to you if you're good. Good? Honest is more what I mean ... Be anything but a coward, a pretender, an emotional crook, a whore: I'd rather have cancer than a dishonest heart. — Truman Capote

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not. — Tom Stoppard

I'm thinking about becoming a farmer and a fisherman - a hunter of swimming plants. — Jarod Kintz

It is not important to me what you think about me, and I don't take what you think personally. I don't take it personally when people say, "Miguel, you are the best," and I don't take it personally when they say, "Miguel, you are the worst." I know that when you are happy you will tell me, "Miguel, you are such an angel!" But, when you are mad at me you will say, "Oh, Miguel, you are such a devil! You are so disgusting. How can you say those things?" Either way, it does not affect me because I know what I am. I don't have the need to be accepted. I don't have the need to have someone tell me, "Miguel, you are doing so good!" or "How dare you do that! — Miguel Ruiz

Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater. — Sandra Cisneros

Many scientists have been drawn to Buddhism out of a sense that the Western tradition has delivered an impoverished conception of basic, human sanity. In the West, if you speak to yourself out loud all day long, you are considered crazy. But speaking to yourself silently - thinking incessantly - is considered perfectly normal. — Sam Harris

Actors and writers need to come back to the theater because it's a place where you can learn. You have to pay your dues, and people who haven't paid their dues in the theater, I think, have a hard time creating a whole career. — Joanne Woodward

That's what I love most about writers
they're such lousy actors. — Vincent H. O'Neil

Question boldly even the existence of God. — Thomas Jefferson

I wondered what it was like to live in a world with the freedom to choose. Did you somehow lose yourself, or your focus, when decisions pulled your mind in so many directions? Was it confusing, burdensome, somehow? — Sarah Domet

The search for truth takes you where the evidence leads you, even if, at first, you don't want to go there. — Bart D. Ehrman

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate. — Tony Kushner

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

I'm a really good team player. That's what it takes to work in the theater. That's what it takes to work in a band with musicians and writers. — David Cassidy

Treat your employees like customers. — Herb Kelleher