Playwright Quotes - Page 12

• About 2500 years ago Aeschylus, the Greek playwright, wrote, He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. These remarkable photos and the stories that accompany them should be on billboards from sea to shining sea, so the pain and suffering they represent might fall drop by drop upon the American psyche and against our will, by the awful grace of God, wisdom might come to these United States and her foreign policy.

  Gioconda Belli

  Pain, Fall, Sleep

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• There are lots of young vital playwrights who are experimenting, and these are the plays that people who are interested in the theatre should see. They should go off Broadway. They should go to the cafe theatres and see the experiments that are being made.

  Edward Albee

  Play, People, Theatre

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• I think that's foolishness on the part of the playwright to write about himself. People don't know anything about themselves.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Thinking, People

  The Believer Interview, www.believermag.com. September 2013.

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• By some curious mischance, a couple of my plays managed to hit an area where commercial success was feasible. But it's wrong to think I'm a commercial playwright who has somehow ceased his proper function. I have always been the same thing - which is not a commercial playwright. I'm not after the brass ring.

  Edward Albee

  Couple, Thinking, Play

  "Conversations with Edward Albee". Book edited by Philip C. Kolin, 1988.

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• Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears and issues that filmmakers, novelists, playwrights, painters have been examining for a long time.

  J. J. Abrams

  Issues, Long, Novelists

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

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• Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.

  Upton Sinclair

  Drama, Grief, Writing

  Upton Sinclair (2016). “Dragon's Teeth”, p.483, Open Road Media

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• A skillful playwright might have a good time with the story of the assassination of President William McKinley, and especially with the three most flamboyant political figures involved: Mark Hanna, Theodore Roosevelt, and Emma Goldman.

  Russell Baker

  Political, President, Stories

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• I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theater is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?

  W. G. Sebald

  Dream, Reality, Lakes

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• Love is two minds without a single thought.

  Philip Barry

  Being Single, Love Is, Two

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• Do remember, though, that unless you're a playwright, the result [dialogue] isn't what you want; it's only an element of what you want. Actors embody and re-create the words of drama. In fiction, a tremendous amount of story and character may be given through the dialogue, but the story-world and its people have to be created by the storyteller. If there's nothing in it but disembodied voices, too much is missing.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Drama, Writing, Character

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• As far as dramas are concerned, it's considered passe for playwrights to turn out anything the average person can understand

  Ethel Merman

  Drama, Average, Turns

  Ethel Merman, George Eells (1979). “Merman: an autobiography”, Berkley Pub Group

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• A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about.

  Arthur Miller

  Art, Writing, Talking

  Arthur Miller (2016). “The Collected Essays of Arthur Miller”, p.229, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• No matter how successful I become as a playwright, my mother would be thrilled to hear me tell her that I'd just lost twenty pounds, gotten married and become a lawyer.

  Wendy Wasserstein

  Mother, Women, Successful

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• I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.

  John Guare

  Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• If you're a playwright, unless you're really lacking in get-up-and-go, you can always get your play up somewhere. You can't necessarily make a living doing it, but theater is about meeting an audience. Plays are not easier to write necessarily, they take less time to write. If you get them up, it's a much more rough-and-tumble kind of existence. I think it's, from my perspective, easier than novel writing.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm not a poet. I wish I was a poet but I'm not. I'm a playwright. And so I have a different set of antecedents.

  Tony Kushner

  Wish, Different, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Being on a film set is like being in tech forever. In theater, when you finally finish rehearsing, you go onstage and you do the lights and the sets and you make the machine of the production work. It takes usually about ten days in the theater, two or three weeks if it's a really big musical. I mean, it's hell on earth. You just sit around forever while they adjust the lights. And every playwright with half a brain runs for the hills when tech starts because it's so boring, and you don't want to talk to the director because the director is running this giant machine.

  Tony Kushner

  Running, Mean, Two

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was a play that was written by who I think is America's greatest playwright, and he wrote a small part in it for me. It was going to open in Chicago, and then go to New York. But then, he died. It was Arthur Miller. That was the reason I turned Lost down.

  Scott Glenn

  Thinking, Arthur, Reason

  Source: collider.com

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• Theater is the foundation of how I live my life, actually. My father was a playwright, so I was around it all the time and loved to talk shop with him, just loved it. And basically everything that I hold to be good and true and worthy, I learned in the theater. So not even just about the work, but just about life. Discipline, problem solving, creativity, how to get along with people.

  Laura Linney

  Father, Creativity, Discipline

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.

  Wilson Mizner

  Drama, Criticism, Theatre

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.

  Arthur Miller

  Country, Way, Ifs

  The New York Times, February 9, 1986.

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• As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

  Tony Kushner

  People, Actors, Wells

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• When I used to teach writing, what I would tell my playwriting students is that while you're writing your plays, you're also writing the playwright. You're developing yourself as a persona, as a public persona. It's going to be partly exposed through the writing itself and partly created by all the paraphernalia that attaches itself to writing. But you aren't simply an invisible being or your own private being at work. You're kind of a public figure, as well.

  Tony Kushner

  Writing, Play, Students

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

  Twyla Tharp

  Inspirational, Dance, Gone

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• I feel like the reason I ended up becoming a playwright is because I never choose the right word. As a kid, my fantasy profession was to be a novelist. But the thing about writing prose - and maybe great prose writers don't feel this way - but I always felt it was about choosing words. I was always like, "I have to choose the perfect word." And then it would kill me, and I would choose the wrong word or I would choose too many perfect words - I wrote really purple prose.

  Annie Baker

  Writing, Kids, Purple

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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