Moss Hart Quotes

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

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.

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.

Self-pity is not a pleasant emotion and is a fruitless one as well, for its point of no return is an onset of black despair in very short order.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can if 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!