Dorothy Parker Quotes

I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.

A stage play ought to be the point of intersection between the visible and invisible worlds, or, in other words, the display, the manifestation of the hidden.

A play that works well and is done quite a lot - I've never done the math - but it's probably more remunerative than a movie.

Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

I think that's the best way to see things, especially this kind of play where there's no pyrotechnics, it's literally just people talking.

I've always said I prefer theater, but there's only ever been one play that I really loved doing, and that was The Seagull.

[The play] is like to be a very conceited scurvy one, in plain English.

I thought the plays would speak for themselves. But they didn't.

[On Katharine Hepburn's stage performance:] She ran the whole gamut of emotions, from A to B.

There was a play that was written by who I think is America's greatest playwright, and he wrote a small part in it for me. It was going to open in Chicago, and then go to New York. But then, he died. It was Arthur Miller. That was the reason I turned Lost down.

It's easier to write about those you hate — just as it's easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music.

I think if you're doing a play, you're rehearsing enough that you get to a point where it's freeing again. But in a movie, if you rehearse too much, now you've just shown everybody what you're going to do. And any element of surprise or impulsiveness is taken away.

No wonder you guys lost.

Literary criticism now is all pranks and polemics.

Closing Bell is unlike any play I've written.

When people don't like the way a play ends, they're likely to blame the play.

That the play is the tragedy, “Man,” And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

When you hear something you don't like, don't ever play it again.

You're always going to be mad about a bad play.

It's Nathaniel Hawthorne Month in English. Poor Nathaniel. Does he know what they've done to him? We're reading The Scarlet Letter one sentence at a time, tearing it up and chewing on its bones. It's all about SYMBOLISM, says Hairwoman. Every word chosen by Nathaniel, every comma, every paragraph break -- these were all done on purpose. To get a decent grade in her class, we have to figure out what he was really trying to say. Why couldn't he just say what he meant? Would they pin scarlet letters on his chest? B for blunt, S for straightforward?

Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.

This is a movie version of the play [All the Way]and when Bryan [Cranston] was on stage the bigness of the man was played to the back of the house. When we turned the cameras on that, it changed a bit with close-ups, but we got just as much power in that beautiful intimacy.

Shakespeare put no children in his plays for a reason," Sir Godfrey muttered, glaring at Alf and Binnie. "You're forgetting the Little Prince," Polly reminded him. "Who he had the good sense to kill off in the second act," snapped Sir Godfrey.