Moss Hart Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Boredom is the keynote of poverty ... it's dark brown sameness.

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.

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.

You'd be surprised how many kings are only a queen with a moustache.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.

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.

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.

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

There's nothing the matter with Hollywood that a good earthquake couldn't cure.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.

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