"I didn't have any friends at school, didn't want any. I felt better being alone. I sat on a bench and watched the others play and they looked foolish to me."
Read quote
11 likes
Play quotes
Play
12.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Play
Browse quotes that often appear alongside play — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Play quotes (page 29 of 627)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I'm mad at Hank Aaron for deciding to play one more season. I threw him his last home run and thought I'd be remembered forever. Now, I'll have to throw him another."
Read quote
11 likes
"A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance-you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke."
Read quote
11 likes
"The desire to play has always been in me. I remember my first experience at about four or five of really dying to sing and dying to play that came from no one telling me to do so."
Read quote
11 likes
"Oft on the dappled turf at ease I sit, and play with similes, Loose type of things through all degrees."
Read quote
11 likes
"I am very glad there are quite a number of people born with a gift and a liking for all of this; like great chessplayers who play sixteen games at once blindfold and die quite soon of epilepsy. Serve them right! I hope the Mathematicians, however, are well rewarded. I promise never to blackleg their profession nor take the bread out of their mouths."
Read quote
11 likes
"Speaking about myself, I've been pleasantly surprised that my older plays are still being performed. Most important is that they still have something to say to today's audience, in particular the young people who enjoy my plays. That's the best I could hope for, that the plays aren't single-use products of one era."
Read quote
11 likes
"I don't think you should ever take life so serious that you forget to play."
Read quote
11 likes
"There is a sort of fair play, and if you can get in touch with that in your life, if you can have that perception, the world will begin to work for you, it will begin to move toward you... Nature loves courage, and it shows you that loves courage because it will remove obstacles."
Read quote
11 likes
"I've never really liked the Yanks. ... You can't trust people who pick up the ball all the time when they play football."
Read quote
11 likes
"In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended."
Read quote
11 likes
"Our character is mainly shaped by our primary social community - the people with whom we eat, play, converse, and study."
Read quote
11 likes
"There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!"
Read quote
11 likes
"I know when I feel good when I play. There's a closeness with musicians you only get from playing live, even in the studio it's still playing live. For me, it's what expands my soul."
Read quote
11 likes
"Spaces between the forms, or the negative shapes, play just as great a role as the positives and they enable you to check the accuracy of your drawing. The positives make the negatives and negatives make the positives."
Read quote
11 likes
"In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow."
Read quote
11 likes
"I really enjoy what I do, and who I'm with and where I am. Having said that, I'm not really a person of habit, because what I do in my job is travel around the world and play concerts to people, and occasionally do very weird things."
Read quote
11 likes
"When the Hollywood thing happened, I thought at some point I'd get to the front of the queue: 'Yes, hello, I'd like to play that role.' But you don't. You just join a different queue."
Read quote
11 likes
"A lot of your personality is formed before you're 12, obviously, but only a few of my plays use characters from my childhood. The more mature plays are affected only by my adult experiences."
Read quote
11 likes
"[When you write a play] you walk into a forest without a knife, without a compass. But . . . if you have a sense of geography, you find that you're clearing a path and getting to the right place."
Read quote
11 likes