Eugene O Neill Quotes

If I had my choice in life I would have had the gifts of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O'Neill. Unfortunately my gifts lie in comedy and so comedy comes fairly easy to me and I occasionally have an idea for a very serious piece and I do it, but the ideas don't come that readily to me.

If man had written the Gospels - say Shakespeare or Eugene O'Neill - the story of the gospel would have been drastically different. They would have placed the prince in halls and palaces and had him walking among the great. They would have had him surrounded by the important and significant of the time. Potentates and kings would have been His companions. But how sweetly common was the real God-man; though He had inhabited all eternity, He had come down and was subject to the rising and the setting of the sun.

Abysmal vermin that I am, I couldn't of course tell her that it was her incredible mother that I wanted to see again… I knew only as I drove through the cold, night autumn air that somewhere Freud, Sophocles and Eugene O’Neill were laughing.

Most playwrights go wrong on the fifth word. When you start a play and you type 'Act one, scene one,' your writing is every bit as good as Arthur Miller or Eugene O'Neill or anyone. It's that fifth word where amateurs start to go wrong.

[Eugene] O'Neill made a living, certainly, at least. But each of these forms have sort of died the death in turn, and it's a simple fact of that universe that talent then migrates away from these forms, and then the amateurs get in, like lunatics in the ruins, sort of pretending to be artists. If you're ambitious enough to want to be a writer to begin with, you want to be a writer in some circumstances where there are rewards, where there's notice, where you don't have to be a teacher, and where you're frankly not nuts for wasting your time.

John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society?