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Playwright Quotes

Browse 372 quotes about Playwright.

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Playwright Quotes

“Men, naar Comoedier ere moralske og opbyggelige, kand jeg ikke see, med hvad Føye man kand kaste Foragt paa Acteurs, som forestille dem. Comoedianter ere vel udi de Roman-Catholske Lande excommunicerede: men, saasom paa mange saadanne Steder Skiøger offentligen tillades, lærer man intet andet deraf, end at den Canon er giort hen i Taaget, eller forfattet af Hypocriter, hvilke ere de eeneste lastværdige Comoedianter; Thi en Øyenskalk spiller de hæsligste Comoedier. Den Forskiel imellem ham og en anden Acteur er denne, at skiønt begge agere forstilte Personer, saa forstiller den første sig, for at bedrage Verden, og den sidste, for at legge Bedragerie og falske Dyder for Lyset.”

PlayActorsChristianityVirtueMoralityTheatreHypocrisyMoralsPlaywrightActorThe World S A Stage
Book:Epistler
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“Ethereal or promiscuous, she is stigmatized by the awesome drive behind her desire, the restlessness of her soul on earth, the mercilessness of her passion, [...] Her desire is grandiose and amoral, beyond the timidity she practices and the conscious morality she knows. She is stigmatized by her capacity for passion, not unlike artistic genius, the great wildness of a soul forever discontent with existing forms and their meanings; but she, unlike the artist, has no adequate means of expression.”

PlaywrightFemale Sexuality
Book:Intercourse
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“Shakespeare's strengths and there are many include his unique ability to vastly improve pre-existing plots and turn them profoundly dark and tragic or lightly comedic and romantic at will. There is also The Bard's lyrical, complex dialogue encoded with hidden meaning that works both in context and out, his towering, unforgettable characterisations, and the variety and depth of his female characters.”

TheaterTheatrePlaywrightShakespeareWilliam ShakespearePlaysBardShakespeareanShakespearean TragedyShakespearean Women
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.”

MemoirAfrican AmericansPlaywrightCivil Rights MovementMississippi Authors
Book:From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir
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“He put a fresh sheet in and, after spending a few moments wishing he were doing something quite different, typed: Gregory: But this is really qutie farcical. Like all the other lines of dialogue he had so far evolved, it struck him as not only in need of instant replacement, but as requiring a longish paragraph of negative stage direction in the faint hope of getting it said ordinarily, and not ordinarily in inverted commas, either. Experimentally, he typed: (Say this without raising your chin or opening your eyes wide or tilting your face or putting on that look of vague affront you use when you think you are "underlining the emergence of a new balance of forces in the scheme of the action" like the producer told you or letting your mind focus more than you can help on sentences like "Mr. Recktham managed to breathe some life into the wooden and conventional part of Gregory" or putting any more expression into it than as if you were reading aloud something you thought was pretty boring (and not as if you were doing an imitation of someone on a stage reading aloud something he thought was pretty boring, either) or hesitating before or after "quite" or saying "fusskle" instead of "farcical".) Breathing heavily, Bowen now x-ed out his original line of dialogue and typed: Gregory: You're just pulling my leg.”

TheaterTheatrePlaywrightScript WritingWriters BlockPlaywritingBritish Humour
Book:I Like It Here
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“Thi enhver Skribent kand nu agere Comoedie Skriver og ingen frygter at see sit Arbeide spildt, i hvor mavert, elendigt og ilde sammenhængende det end er naar han tager den Præcaution at det endes med Sang og Dantz, hvilket man og seer at vor Alders Autores nøye i agttage. Man seer heraf, at en forderved Smag ogsaa har sin Nytte i Verden, og at det, som jeg derom skiemteviis har skrevet udi mine Moralske Tanker er ikke gandske ugrundet.”

TheatrePlaywrightComediesBread And Circus
Book:Epistler
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“The words of his various writing instructors and professional mentors over the years came back to him at times like these, and he found a new understanding in their advice: Writing is rewriting. The rough draft is just that. You can’t polish what you haven’t written. Things that made for a normal life—like a daily routine that followed the sun—took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn’t a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep. He would often awake with a new idea—as if he’d merely been on a break and not unconscious—and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot’s seat in a ship that could go anywhere.”

InspirationActingCreativityTheaterPlaywrightDirectingPlaywrightsPlaywrightingInspiration For Writers
Book:Death Troupe
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“With Death Troupe, we come as close to the never-ending rehearsal as we can without going full improv. Your characters can’t become set because the culprit is different in every version of the play. Your lines can’t become rote recitation because the execution of those lines has to leave you ready to believably shift your character in any number of different directions. And even if we reach the point where every one of you could perform every variant of the play perfectly in your sleep, there’s an audience just feet away, working against you, trying to figure you out, trying to catch you in a slip JUST ONCE.”

MotivationActingTheaterTheatreRehearsalPlaywrightStaleScriptDirecting
Book:Death Troupe
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“So here it is: A month of heartbreaking, gut-wrenching work that, if we do it right, leads to no definite conclusion. Eighteen-hour days and eighteen-hour nights. For you new members, this will feel like some kind of endurance race. We’ve got one month to break down this awful script, rebuild it, learn every one of its variations, and then rehearse the result until you can do it in your sleep. But even then we won’t be finished, because there’s a hostile crowd out there just dying to be the first ones to solve the mystery—which we will not let them do. Let’s get to work.”

MotivationActingTheaterTheatreDeceptionRehearsalPlaywrightStage PlayDirectingPlaywrights
Book:Death Troupe
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“You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.”

LooksIdeasFeelingsChoicesActorsActingMaterialsPlaywright
Book:Stella Adler - The Art of Acting: preface by Marlon Brando compiled & edited by Howard Kissel
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“More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.”

RealPlayCharacterLiteratureDifferencesPoetBritishInventionContemporaryScholarImaginaryTomsPortraitsPlaywrightRosencrantz And Guildenstern
Author:Mel Gussow
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“I did a thing called 24 Hour Plays, a thing they do every year on Broadway. A bunch of playwrights and actors get together, you write a play and you act it out in 24 hours, literally. People pay and the money goes to charity. So I did one - I was horrible. I was bad. I was terrified. And I was like, "Oh, I gotta do this again." Because I know I can do it.”

PeopleKnowsWritingYearsI CanPlayTogetherActorsCan DoHoursPayCharityHorribleBunchTerrifiedBroadwayPlaywrightGet TogetherI Can Do It
Author:Scott Raab
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“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?”

ThinkingSaidTwoNextAsksMistakeMoralImpossibleGenerationsDoorsRight NowCrisisSolveThese DaysResolveNext GenerationPlaywrightKnockingYounger GenerationMoral CourageNorwegiansIbsen
Author:Al Gore
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