A biography for Richard Brinsley Sheridanhasn’t been written yet.
“A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in.”
“Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day.”
“You know it is not my interest to pay the principal, or my principal to pay the interest.”
“I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again, night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”
“Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two!”
“Modesty is a quality in a lover more praised by the women than liked.”
“SNEER. But, what the deuce, is the confidante to be mad too?PUFF. To be sure she is. The confidante is always to do whatever her mistress does- weep when she weeps, smile when she smiles, go mad when she goes mad.-Now, Madam Confidante! But keep your madness in the background, if you please.”
“I open with a clock striking, to beget an awful attention in the audience - it also marks the time, which is four o clock in the morning, and saves a description of the rising sun, and a great deal about gilding the eastern hemisphere.”
“You write with ease to show your breeding, but easy writing's curst hard reading.”
“He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts.”
“The surest way to fail is not to determine to succeed.”
“There's no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature.”
“For if there is anything to one's praise, it is foolish vanity to be gratified at it, and if it is abuse - why one is always sure to hear of it from one damned good-natured friend or another!”
“There is nothing on earth so easy as to forget, if a person chooses to set about it. I'm sure I have as much forgot your poor, dear uncle, as if he had never existed; and I thought it my duty to do so.”
“Never say more than is necessary.”