Playwrights From The United States

"War puts burdens on people without caring whether they are ready for them or not."

"“Why? Why do you trust me?” The Hirebrand’s eyes gleamed as if he were on the verge of tears, but he was smiling as he said, “You are a man who knows the value of beauty.”"

"“One word more,” Foul said, “a final caution: Do not forget whom to fear at the last. I have had to be content with killing and torment. But now my plans are laid, and I have begun. I shall not rest until I have eradicated hope from the Earth. Think on that, and be dismayed!”"

"In war men pass like shadows that stain the grass, Leaving their lives upon the green: While Earth bewails the crimson sheen, Men’s dreams and stars and whispers all helpless pass."

"It was clear to all there gathered that power is a dreadful thing, and that knowledge of power dims the seeing of the wise."

"Power is power. Its uses are in the hands of the user."

"I have no special virtue to make me resent him. One must have strength in order to judge the weakness of others. I am not so mighty."

"No one person has the right to withhold knowledge from another. No one is wise enough."

"At his best, Howells was considered a novelist on a par with his other great friend, Henry James. Though that level of esteem did not survive the 19th century, Howells finished his long life enjoying the sobriquet, "the Dean of American Letters.""

"For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment. In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities — clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing — he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world. SUSTAINED. I entrench myself behind that protecting word. There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights. In the matter of verbal exactness Mr. Howells has no superior, I suppose. He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD. Others have to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he has better luck. ...Mr. Howells has done much work, and the spirit of it is as beautiful as the make of it. I have held him in admiration and affection so many years that I know by the number of those years that he is old now; but his heart isn't, nor his pen; and years do not count. Let him have plenty of them; there is profit in them for us."

"William Dean Howells (who ought to be venerated at least as much as Willa Cather, if not more)"

"Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."

"What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending."

"I recently came upon the unjustly neglected but blissful novels of William Dean Howells. Like Jane Austen, they revel in domestic success and unsuccess; like Henry James, they sometimes set their Americans in Europe; like Anthony Trollope, they are skeptically aware of political turmoil."

"An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen. This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty."

"The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright."

"Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature."

"The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all."

"I am not sorry for having wrought in common, crude material so much; that is the right American stuff; and perhaps hereafter, when my din is done, if anyone is curious to know what that noise was, it will be found to have proceeded from a small insect which was scraping about on the surface of our life and trying to get into its meaning for the sake of the other insects larger or smaller. That is, such has been my unconscious work; consciously, I was always, as I still am, trying to fashion a piece of literature out of the life next at hand."

"See how today's achievement is only tomorrow's confusion; See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious."

"The wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment."

"The life of Christ, it wasn't only in healing the sick and going about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others. That's as great a mystery as the mystery of death. Why should there be such a principle in the world? But it's been felt, and more or less dumbly, blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them. That's what has created the religious orders in all times--the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our day as much as to the mediaeval past. That's what is driving a girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the dying."

"We live, but a world has passed away With the years that perished to make us men."

"Lord, for the erring thought Not into evil wrought: Lord, for the wicked will Betrayed and baffled still: For the heart from itself kept, Our thanksgiving accept. For ignorant hopes that were Broken to our blind prayer: For pain, death, sorrow, sent Unto our chastisement: For all loss of seeming good, Quicken our gratitude."

"And before you know me gone Eternity and I are one."

"Her mouth is a honey-blossom, No doubt, as the poet sings; But within her lips, the petals, Lurks a cruel bee that stings."

"He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence [...]"

"My first real job was as an art editor of the People's Voice...The secretary who was there gently growing her wings was Lorraine Hansberry."

"The position of women has been debated in socialist and communist circles, but even there it is usually left as a question. And black women specifically? They have never been a primary subject of the American Left, always falling somewhere in the cracks between the Negro Question and the Woman Question. As we've seen, key interventions by the likes of Ida B. Wells or Claudia Jones attempted to disrupt color- and class-struggle-as-usual, but few leftists paid attention. Nearly half a century ago, black playwright and critic Lorraine Hansberry took the Communists to task for failing to recognize that the Woman Question stood alongside class, race, colonialism, and the struggle for peace as "the greatest social question existent.""

""We the people-still an excellent phrase," said the playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all…Lorraine Hansberry spoke her words about government during the Cuban missile crisis, at a public meeting in New York to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee. She also said in that speech, "My government is wrong." She did not say, I abhor all government. She claimed her government as a citizen, African American, and female, and she challenged it."

"Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

"It is hard for me to talk about Lorraine in a way because I loved her. She was like my baby sister, in a way. I can't think of her without a certain amount of pain. Every artist, every writer goes under the hammer. But under ordinary circumstances, since a writer's real ambition is to be anonymous and since his work is done in private, one arrives at some way of living with the hammer. But the black writer is by definition public, and he lives under something much worse. The pressure of being a writer is one thing, but the pressure of being a public figure is another and they are antithetical, too. The strain can kill you. It is certainly one of the things that killed Lorraine, who was very vivid, very young, very curious, very courageous, very honest. But she died, as you know, subsequent to the eruption in Birmingham, as the country, in fact, began to go over the cliff. Many of us began to realize then that there was no way of redeeming the American Republic. It was bent on destruction. This was one of the things that killed her. It was the incomprehension of her country and the disaster overtaking the nation, which, after all, she, like I, had many reasons to love. We were born there, and our ancestors paid a great deal for it."

"I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and — I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations."

"The great victims in this country of the institution called segregation, which is not solely a southern custom but has been for a hundred years a national way of life-the great victims are the white people, and the white man's children. Lorraine Hansberry said this afternoon when we were talking about the problem of being a Negro male in this society. Lorraine said that she wasn't too concerned really about Negro manhood since they had managed to endure and to even transcend fantastic things, but she was very worried about a civilization which could produce those 5 policemen standing on the Negro woman's neck in Birmingham or wherever it was, and I am too."

"Don't get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think."

"Years later when Alpheus Hunton, Lou Burnham and Lorraine Hansberry started Freedom, the newspaper in which Paul Robeson wrote, they portrayed Africa-a big black giant, in shackles, ready to break loose. I realized then that there was a large segment of Black America caught up in the African movement, in African history."

"There is always something left to love. And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and for the family 'cause we lost the money. I mean for him; what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most; when they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning — because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in hisself 'cause the world done whipped him so. When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to wherever he is."

"A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men — and people in general."

"I look at you and I see the final triumph of stupidity in the world!"

"Children see things very well sometimes — and idealists even better."

"I remember two playwrights who affected me deeply, for their wit especially: Edward Albee and Samuel Beckett. I found their sense of absurdity comforting."

"You need great precision in the way the words are delivered, and in the way the emotions are understood. If you start leaving out words or putting them in or coming in on the wrong bit it spoils it. But Albee understands that when you are playing a play it's very important that it's naturalistic on the surface. That it is like jazz. If the actors are playing well together, you have the structure, you have the beats, but you maybe play it a bit differently every night."

"It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep."

"Remember one thing about democracy. We can have anything we want and at the same time, we always end up with exactly what we deserve."

"The only time I'll get good reviews is if I kill myself."

"The gods too are fond of a joke."

"I survive almost any onslaught with a shrug, which must appear as arrogance, but really isn't because I'm not an arrogant person. When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions — that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that it's worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. That's all. And then you go about your business, assuming you'd be the first to know if your talent has collapsed. I don't think I've been a commercial playwright ever. By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing — which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring. I very seldom get it anyway, and then it's accidental when I do. … So I write those things that interest me."

"If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic."

"I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing — and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga — it will all equal itself out... You can't involve yourself with the vicissitudes of fashion or critical response. I'm fairly confident that my work is going to be around for a while. I am pleased and reassured by the fact that a lot of younger playwrights seem to pay me some attention and gain some nourishment from what I do."

"I created myself, and I'll attack anybody I feel like."