Top 66 Playwright Quotes

I love what I do, and I love the audience, and I love the fact that I get to do it, and I love, I love our craft very, very, much, and it’s a noble craft. We have a responsibility to it, and to the audience, and to the playwright, and to the message. I won’t ever care less.

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

How can even the best novelist or playwright invent someone like Augustus Caesar or Catherine the Great, Galileo or Florence Nightingale? How can screenwriters create better action stories or human dramas than exist, thousand upon thousand, throughout the many centuries of recorded history?

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.

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

I feel like I’m a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

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

The first theater subscription I ever bought was the August Wilson season at Signature. I remember thinking a whole season to one playwright was a great way for a master to do a victory lap.

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

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 didn’t have a dream of being a press secretary, I had a dream of being a playwright; I had a dream of being a novelist and a poet.

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 always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It’s storytelling.

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.

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.

On stage, I have felt most fulfilled as a playwright, for everything I create gets to grow and evolve with collaboration from directors, actors, and so on.

In America, the average playwright makes less than a receptionist in a non-profit theatre. We don’t have decent health insurance – or any health insurance at all.

I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.

I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.

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

I just love working with actors, and I love working with writers, working with designers. I feel that I am just a storyteller, and whether I am wearing the director hat or the playwright hat, it doesn’t matter. And the rooms I tend to be in are pretty democratic, and the best idea wins.

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

To see professional actors do my work, to take it seriously – that was the thing that made me think playwriting could actually be what I do. It’s not a profession that has some sort of clear career track, like, ‘This is what you do to be a playwright.’

When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.

I am an internationally produced playwright.

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 not posh at all. I grew up in Sheffield but never managed to pick up the accent – which was careless because there’d be some cache now in being a northern playwright, but I missed out on that one.

I’m just a Chicago actor who’s a playwright. Even with the success of ‘August,’ the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they’ve seen me onstage so much.

My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.

When I was 18 and not sure whether I wanted to be an actor, I realised that a playwright has no voice without an actor. That’s my reason for acting: to get that character as right as possible for my writer. And I have never changed my philosophy.

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.’

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

Vidal was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter, and many other things. Buckley started a magazine, hosted a TV show, lead a political movement, and was a master debater. They were multihyphenates in a way that you rarely see anymore.

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.

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.

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

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

My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He’s the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

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.

Stage is the place of the playwright: you’re guided by great actors and directors, but it’s the playwright’s word on the page that counts.

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.

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.’

Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright’s pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.

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’m not a playwright.

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don’t consider it a career at all.

I never wanted to be 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.

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.

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.

Tom Stoppard, the English-speaking world’s brainiest playwright, thinks that British audiences have grown too dumb to understand his plays.

I’m on Twitter every single week. It’s sort of like being a playwright standing in the back of the theater.