Moss Hart (October 24, 1904 - December 20, 1961) was a celebrated and commercially successful playwright, collaborating with fellow writer George S. Kaufman on works like Once in a Lifetime and the Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You. Hart was also a stage director and film screenwriter, having penned Judy Garland's A Star Is Born. (Click here for full biography.com article)
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A playwright must have the courage to make mistakes.
A sharp sense of the ironic can be the equivalent of the faith that moves mountains. Far more quickly than reason or logic, irony can penetrate rage and puncture self-pity.
Boredom is the keynote of poverty... for where there is no money there is no change of any kind, not of scene or of routine.
Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one's own.
He's the kind of fellow I'd be if I were a Jew, isn't he?
I have a pet theory of my own, probably invalid, that the theatre is an inevitable refuge of the unhappy child.
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.
Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.
Nothing is immutable. The logic of one year is a folly of the next.
One begins with two people on a stage, and one of them had better say something pretty damn quick.
Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.
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.
Self-deception is sometimes as necessary a tool as a crowbar.
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.
The self-hatred that destroys is the waste of unfulfilled promise.
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.
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.
You'd be surprised how many kings are only a queen with a moustache.
Categories: Moss Hart, Quotes of the day
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