Where in the wide history of the world do we find art created by the excessively wealthy, powerful, or educated?
The audience will teach you how to act and the audience will teach you how to write and to direct. The classroom will teach you how to obey, and obedience in the theatre will get you nowhere. It’s a soothing falsity.
We recipients of the boon of liberty have always been ready, when faced with discomfort, to discard any and all first principles of liberty, and, further, to indict those who do not freely join with us in happily arrogating those principles.
Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist.
Policemen so cherish their status as keepers of the peace and protectors of the public that they have occasionally been known to beat to death those citizens or groups who question that status.
Fun is what you do for yourself. If somebody else does it, it’s entertainment.
Put. That coffee. Down. Coffee’s for closers only.
Luck, if there is such a thing, is either going to favor everyone equally or going to exhibit a preference for the prepared.
Everyone needs money. That’s why they call it money.
Worry is interest paid in advance on a debt that never comes due...
We respond to a drama to that extent to which it corresponds to our dream life.
In a restaurant one is both observed and unobserved. Joy and sorrow can be displayed and observed “unwittingly,” the writer scowling naively and the diners wondering, What the hell is he doing?
My alma mater is the Chicago Public Library. I got what little educational foundation I got in the third-floor reading room, under the tutelage of a Coca-Cola sign.
I’m not the guy to ask about politics. I’m a gag writer.
I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn’t what’s on the screen. It’s what you have to do to raise the money.
Many players will not improve because they cannot bear self-knowledge.
As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.
We all hope. It’s what keeps us alive.
Before you can steal fire from the Gods you gotta be able to get coffee for the director.
Hitchcock denigrated American films, saying they were all ‘pictures of people talking’ – as, indeed, most of them are.