Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandellowas an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre." Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd...
NationalityItalian
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth28 June 1867
CountryItaly
If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you.
There is someone who is living my life. And I know nothing about him.
We ride through life on the beast within us. Beat the animal, but you can't make it think.
Our spirits have their own private way of understanding each other, of becoming intimate, while our external persons are still trapped in the commerce of ordinary words, in the slavery of social rules. Souls have their own needs and their own ambitions, which the body ignores when it sees that it's impossible to satisfy them or achieve them.
Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.
I hate symbolic art in which the presentation loses all spontaneous movement in order to become a machine, an allegory -- a vain and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical sense to a presentation clearly shows that we have to do with a fable which by itself has no truth either fantastic or direct; it was made for the demonstration of some moral truth.
When [man] is happy he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't analyze it, just as if happiness were his right.
Six Characters in Search of an Author.
Life is a very sad piece of buffoonery, because we have .. the need to fool ourselves continuously by the spontaneous creation of a reality .. which, from time to time, reveals itself to be vain and illusory.
Personally, I don't give a rap for documents; for the truth in my eyes is not in them but in the mind.
Logic is one thing, the human animal another. You can quite easily propose a logical solution to something and at the same time hope in your heart of hearts it won't work out.
It is the hardest thing to close the open hand of someone you love.
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
We're like so many puppets hung on the wall, waiting for someone to come and move us or make us talk.