Definition of Playwright

Playwright

A maker or adapter of plays.

Related Definitions:

Adapter, Maker, Of, Or

Playwright Quotations

A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
Arthur Miller

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.
Vivien Leigh

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.
Orson Scott Card

A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Wilson Mizner

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
Jose Saramago

I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
Francis Ford Coppola

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?
Don DeLillo

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
Alex Cox

An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.
George Jean Nathan

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.
Peter Shaffer

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
Beth Henley

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.
Timothy West

The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
George P. Baker

It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
John Lithgow

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.
Peter Shaffer

If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.
Brad Dourif

Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.
William Goldman

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
Beth Henley

The mission of the playwright is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.
Robert Anderson

I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.
Liev Schreiber

I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.
Lusia Strus

Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.
Mark Helprin

A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
Terence Rattigan

I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.
Laura Linney