drama

🇦🇺William Shakespeare

Literature

English Renaissance

1948–2010

"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."

🇫🇷Albert Camus

Literature

continental philosophy

1913–1960

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Leo Tolstoy

Literature

literary realism

1828–1910

"Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be."

Anton Chekhov

Literature

Modernism

1860–1904

"The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!"

🇺🇸Cormac McCarthy

Literature

1933–2023

"My daddy always told me to just do the best you knew how and tell the truth. He said there was nothin to set a man's mind at ease like wakin up in the morning and not havin to decide who you were."

🇮🇪Samuel Beckett

Literature

Nouveau Roman

1906–1989

"The confusion is not my invention. We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in."

🇬🇧W. Somerset Maugham

Literature

1874–1965

"Few misfortunes can befall a boy which bring worse consequences than to have a really affectionate mother."

🇵🇱Stanisław Lem

Literature

1921–2006

"Man does not create gods, in spite of appearances. The times, the age, impose them on him. Man can serve his age or rebel against it, but the target of his cooperation or rebellion comes to him from outside."

🇫🇷André Malraux

Literature

1901–1976

"One cannot create an art that speaks to me when one has nothing to say."

🇺🇸Mitch Albom

Literature

b. 1958

"It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets."

Jerome K. Jerome

drama

1859–1927

"It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one."

🇦🇹Bertolt Brecht

Literature

1898–1956

"Brecht's works in English: A bibliography"

Tom Stoppard

Literature

1937–2025

"The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists."

🇧🇷Oswald de Andrade

Literature

1890–1954

"Tupi or not tupi - That is the question."

🇷🇴Eugène Ionesco

Literature

Surrealism

1909–1994

"People who don’t read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn’t it?"

"When Greeks joined Greeks, then was the tug of war."

🇺🇸Wendy Wasserstein

Education

1950–2006

"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable."

🇺🇸William Vaughn Moody

Literature

1869–1910

"The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody"

🇬🇧Ian McEwan

Literature

b. 1948

"And though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you."

🇮🇪Brian O'Nolan

satire

1911–1966

"Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses."

🇬🇧Christopher Fry

Literature

1907–2005

"Christopher Fry Obituary from The Telegraph"

🇩🇪Hugo Ball

Literature

Dada

1886–1927

"That is the meaning of the coming of Christ.. ..that the word becomes flesh and man is saved from abstraction."

🇬🇧Angela Carter

Literature

Realism

1940–1992

"I think I want to be in love with you but I don't know how."

Oliver Goldsmith

Literature

1728–1774

"I love everything that's old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines."

🇲🇽Louis C.K.

Entertainment

b. 1967

"They charged me 15 dollars. That's how much it costs to only have 20 dollars."

"Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."

🇬🇧Carol Ann Duffy

Literature

b. 1955

"When you have a child, your previous life seems like someone else's. It's like living in a house and suddenly finding a room you didn't know was there, full of treasure and light."

🇫🇷Georges Duhamel

Politics

1884–1966

"Aristocracy of the mind … is the only true aristocracy in my opinion. It is the essence, the very life of a well-built society."

Ivan Krylov

Journalism

1769–1844

"It is only when our consciences become tangled that the truth begins to hurt."

🇬🇧Geoffrey Hill

Literature

1932–2016

"Charles Péguy, stubborn rancours and mishaps and all, is one of the great souls, one of the great prophetic intelligences of the 20th century.I offer my poem as my homage to the triumph of his 'defeat'."

"It must be someone collecting for charity. Respectable women never call the family for any other reason."

🇬🇧Peter Shaffer

Literature

1926–2016

"The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you."

🇺🇸Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Literature

Beat Generation

1919–2021

"Poetry is the shadow cast by our imaginations."

🇺🇸María Irene Fornés

Literature

avant-garde

1930–2018

"Theater is a service where the god keeps changing…Sometimes it’s the actor. Sometimes it’s the director. Sometimes it’s the stage manager. Sometimes, but almost never, it’s the playwright."

🇺🇸Sholem Asch

Literature

1880–1957

"Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence."

🇺🇸J. P. Donleavy

Literature

1926–2017

"Rid the mind of knowledge when looking for pleasure. Or start thinking and find a lot of pain."

John Cleland

Literature

1709–1789

"All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice."

🇺🇸José Rivera (playwright)

Literature

b. 1955

"I was lucky…because my grandparents, who lived with us, were illiterate but they were great storytellers, so I got a kind of storytelling bug from them."