Moss Hart Quotes
-
Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.
→ -
There's nothing the matter with Hollywood that a good earthquake couldn't cure.
→ -
The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.
→ -
Other centuries had their driving forces. What will ours have been when men look far back to it one day? Maybe it won't be the American Century, after all. Or the Russian Century or the Atomic Century. Wouldn't it be wonderful, Phil, if it turned out to be everybody's century, when people all over the world--free people--found a way to live together? I'd like to be around to see some of that, even the beginning.
→ -
Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will always be? It can and it does!
→ -
There is nothing that one can say about acting, writing, producing or directing that cannot be revoked in the next breath. Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.
→ -
One of the grave dangers inherent in the various stages of any theatrical career-whether it be budding, quiescent or diminishing-is the advice of friends.
→ -
New York is not a city to return to in defeat.
→ -
You'd be surprised how many kings are only a queen with a moustache.
→ -
The frivolity with which all theatrical activity is conducted has one consoling feature-there are no rules of behavior that apply regularly to any part of the theatre.
→ -
I have had the irreplaceable opportunity of learning my profession with the proper tools, the most important of which is not a pencil or a typewriter, but the necessary time to think before using them.
→ -
Poor people know poor people, and rich people know rich people. It is one of the few things La Rochefoucauld did not say, but then La Rochefoucauld never lived in the Bronx.
→ -
The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream. For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures, not caring who they were or where they came from.
→ -
Without vanity a writer's work is tepid, and he must accept his vanity as part of his stock in trade and live with it as one of the hazards of his profession.
→ -
Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.
→ -
One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick.
→ -
Boredom is the keynote of poverty — of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with — for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine. To be able to break out of its dark brown sameness.
→ -
Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.
→ -
Charity in the theatre usually begins and ends with people who have a play opening the week following one's own. Their unlikely benevolence is not so much a purity of heart as the knowledge that they face a firing line with rifles aimed in exactly the same direction.
→ -
Boredom is the keynote of poverty - of all its indignities, it is perhaps the hardest of all to live with - for where there is no money there is no change of any kind.
→ -
There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.
→ -
So far as I know, anything worth hearing is not usually uttered at seven o'clock in the morning; and if it is, it will generally be repeated at a more reasonable hour for a larger and more wakeful audience.
→ -
I have always understood the unbelieving look in the eyes of those whom success touches early - it is a look half fearful, as though the dream were still in the process of being dreamed and to move or to speak would shatter it.
→ -
How many of us would be willing to settle when we're young for what we eventually get? All those plans we make...what happens to them? It's only a handful of the lucky ones that can look back and say that they even came close.
→ -
A too constant preoccupation with money may seem to indicate the lack of a proper sense of moral values, but [let] those who have always had money . . . be without it for a while, and they will soon discover how quickly it becomes their chief concern.
→ -
Far more quickly than reason and logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
→ -
The theatre breeds its own kind of cruelty, and its sadism takes on a keener edge since it can be enjoyed under the innocent guise of critical judgment.
→ -
Julie Andrews has a wonderful British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.
→ -
A play for me never really takes on an aspect of reality until it has left the dryair of the study and begins to sniff the musty breezes of a bare stage.
→ -
A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quicky than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
→
Related Authors
-
Alan Jay Lerner Lyricist -
Frederic Loewe Composer -
Annaleigh Ashford Actress -
Stephen Sondheim Composer -
William Shakespeare Poet -
Alexander Woollcott Critic -
Gertrude Lawrence Actress -
Kurt Weill Composer -
Lorenz Hart Lyricist -
Tony Shalhoub Actor -
Monty Woolley Film actor -
Robert Riskin Screenwriter -
Kitty Carlisle Singer -
George Hamilton Film actor -
Elmer Rice Playwright -
Edna Ferber Novelist -
Santino Fontana Actor -
George S. Kaufman Playwright -
James Earl Jones Actor -
Irving Berlin Composer