MOSS HART

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.

Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own.

All the mistakes I ever made were when I wanted to say 'No' and said 'Yes'.

Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.

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.

New York is not a city to return to in defeat.

Far more quickly than reason and logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.

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.

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.

Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty quick.

I have had many successes and many failures in my life. My successes have always been for different reasons, but my failures have always been for the same reason: I said yes when I meant no.

Julie Andrews has a wonderful British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.

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.

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.

There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.

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.

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.

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.

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.