Moss Hart Quotes

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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 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.

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.

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

Nobody bores any man as much as an unhappy female.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.