Crafts Quotes - Page 29

• I write in order to understand the images. Being what my agent . . . somewhat ruefully calls a language playwright, is problematic because in production, you have to make the language lift off the page. But a good actor can turn it into human speech. I err sometimes toward having such a compound of images that if an actor lands heavily on each one, you never pull through to a larger idea. That's a problem for the audience. But I come to playwriting from the visual world - I used to be a painter. I also really love novels and that use of language. But it's tricky to ask that of the theatre.

  Ellen McLaughlin

  Writing, Order, Land

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• I'm like a blue-collar writer. I just sit down every day and I write.

  Philip Kan Gotanda

  Writing, Blue, Collars

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• Harvey [Weinstein] didn't want to release [MY SON THE FANATIC]; he held it for two years because he wanted a happy ending, although I don't know what that means. Does that mean the taxi driver leaves his wife or doesn't leave his wife? I think it has a happy ending.

  Hanif Kureishi

  Mean, Son, Thinking

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• Actually, who hasn't been through the ghastly experience of sitting in front of a blank page, with its toothless mouth grinning at you: Go ahead, let's see you lay a finger on me? A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant.

  Amos Oz

  Wall, Doors, Mouths

  Amos Oz (1999). “The Story Begins: Essays on Literature”, Harcourt

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• The dream of a writer is to be surprised by his characters. All of a sudden, they are living their own lives; they are not prisoners anymore. . . . Tati taught me how to observe, how to sit in a cafe in Paris and to look at the passersby and to guess what their story is, even a little moment of their story.

  Jean-Claude Carriere

  Dream, Character, Paris

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• [VIA DOLOROSA]'s pushing Broadway as far as it can be pushed. I stand before you as a reporter, and you have to decide whether I'm an honest reporter or not. And if you're convinced that I am honest, then I think that you will listen to me in a way that you wouldn't have listened to a fiction where scenes are made. . . . I've thought quite long and hard about what I want to say in this play. And if it means that every single sentiment that I produce is put minutely under an ideological microscope, that's fine.

  David Hare

  Mean, Thinking, Play

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• A play gets on Broadway by fluke. And you don't even start out with that ambition. When I do a play, the intention is just to put it up somewhere.

  Richard Greenberg

  Ambition, Play, Broadway

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• Broadway remains the closest thing we have to a national theatre, the place where the greatest number of people can potentially see new work. For an American playwright to say it doesn't matter is simply to capitulate to the current situation.

  Tony Kushner

  Numbers, People, Theatre

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• Talk isn't work. Work is when you have pages in the evening that you didn't have in the morning.

  Frederic Raphael

  Morning, Pages, Evening

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• It's a movie, OK? I went to see GONE WITH THE WIND, but did I really believe there was a guy named Rhett Butler who said, "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"? No. Movies need heroes and villains, and real life doesn't usually have heroes and villains. Real life has a lot of shades of gray, and moves have black and white even when they're in color.

  Don Hewitt

  Real, Moving, Hero

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• I am the same artist with the same nagging questions I had in my early 20's. What's real and what isn't? How do we tell what's real in our lives? How do we see things as they are? What is my role in life? If the Signature hadn't forced the issue by devoting its season to my plays, I could at least believe I had changed. Really, they're all the same! What is SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION but THE HOUSE OF BLUE LEAVES with money?

  John Guare

  Real, Believe, Artist

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• Consider: for all the gobbledegook [film studio] executives spout about backstory, all that we, the audience, want to know is what happens next. That's the only thing that's going on. . . . Character is nothing other than action, and character-driven means The plot stinks, and you'd better hope the star is popular enough to open the movie in spite of it.

  David Mamet

  Stars, Character, Mean

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• Obviously VIA DOLOROSA is completely artificial. It is as highly wrought as any of my plays. But basically all the artifice is to disguise itself so you don't feel it's there. You're attempting to make the artifice like a pane of glass that simply leads you through to the subject - not to decorate the bloody glass.

  David Hare

  Glasses, Play, Attempting

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• There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.

  Anthony Minghella

  Character, Heart, Careers

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• Real life has always let me down. That's why I do the monologues. I have always said I would rather tell a life than live a life. But I have to live a life in order to tell one.

  Spalding Gray

  Real, Order, Said

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• What I find interesting is how close you can run the laughter along the seam of seriousness, and occasionally cross it, so that half the house genuinely doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Custard pie humour is fairly universal, but at the other end, which I'm more interested in, there's the humour that hovers on the darkness, that walks in the shadow of something else, not always that obvious.

  Alan Ayckbourn

  Running, Laughter, Pie

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• Regarding pushing the form, ideas interest me more than form. I think you can write a very subversive play in a three-act structure. The content makes the play. I feel the form is simply dressing, because ultimately, you want to communicate to the audience, and sometimes the best way to do that is to present a provocative idea in a format that is comfortable for them to receive. Then the idea will come through directly, right in solar plexus. After all, I want to make a living as an artist, and that means speaking to the audience in a form they can understand.

  Caridad Svich

  Mean, Writing, Thinking

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• So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play.

  August Wilson

  Reality, Play, Plot

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• . . . I felt I was finally in a position to affect not only the artistic content of the American theatre, but also its institutional structures. This has been an important goal of mine, as there have always been a variety of issues - artistic freedom, author's rights, access by minority groups - which have concerned me and even influenced my decision to become a playwright in the first place.

  David Henry Hwang

  Rights, Issues, Goal

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• We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.

  Simon McBurney

  Inspirational, Work, People

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• I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.

  Alberto Giacometti

  Long, Trying, Want

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• I think in this country we're committed to developing plays, and many plays I've seen have been rewritten too much. The scenes are tight, the play ends at the right time, you know exactly what the scene is about, but it seems flat; you can almost see that too many hands have been on the play. The individual voice is gone.

  A. R. Gurney

  Country, Thinking, Hands

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• Craft takes time, and therefore it is luxury. You cannot do an amazingly well-made garment without taking time—not just the time it takes to make something but also the time it took the maker to come up with the idea. That is all luxury, and that has been lost because were trying to make things faster and faster, cheaper and cheaper. The consumer tends to lose track of what luxury is.

  Isabel Toledo

  Ideas, Luxury, Track

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• Having a background in doing printmaking and letterpress, I think that I became very interested in images that were flat and graphic. And my painting still today is very flat...American craft is like that too - the painting is very flat. And also the painting that you see on the storefronts, handmade signs, tend to be very flat. That's probably my biggest influence.

  Margaret Kilgallen

  Thinking, Today, Painting

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• We think craft is important, and the irony has always been that horror may be disregarded by critics, but often they are the best-made movies you're going to find in terms of craft. You can't scare people if they see the seams.

  James Wan

  Thinking, People, Scare

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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