Playwright Quotes (3 quotes)
By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.
In Christian Science Monitor (14 Nov 62).
Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights.
In article 'Roaming in the Gloaming' collected in Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humour and Himself (1989). As cited in Eugene Ehrlich and Marshall De Bruhl (eds.)International Thesaurus of Quotations (1996), 601.
To me the intellectual must be a scientist, for only a scientist can appreciate to the full the cosmic triviality of man. Your so-called intellectual in author or playwright is no true intellectual in the present sense—he is only an ordinary man gone astray, still thinking about man, even if he thinks pessimistically about him.
From Lecture (28 Nov 1957) in the Queen’s University, Belfast, 'Is the Study of its History a Brake on the Progress of Science', printed in Hermethena (1958), 19, 27.