Playwright Quotes - Page 14

• Plays are getting smaller and smaller, not because playwrights minds are shrinking but because of the economics.

  Lynn Nottage

  Play, Mind, Shrinking

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• Mere wealth, I am above it, / It is the reputation wide, / The playwright's pomp, the poet's pride / That eagerly I covet.

  Phyllis McGinley

  Pride, Reputation, Wealth

  Phyllis McGinley (1946). “Stones from a glass house: new poems by Phyllis McGinley”, Viking Press

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• But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

  Beth Henley

  Novelists, Poet, Copyright

  "Expressing "The Misery and Confusion Truthfully": An Interview with Beth Henley". "American Drama" Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2005.

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• A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.

  David Mamet

  Cutting, Thinking, Guy

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• It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.

  Kenneth Tynan

  Years, Sacred, Theater

  Kenneth Tynan (1964). “Tynan on theatre”

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• Screenwriting is a terrible way to make a living and I always try to talk anyone out of it. Until you sit in a story meeting with studio executives with no particular ability or actors who haven't even graduated high school telling you exactly how to change your script, you haven't experienced what it's really like to be a screenwriter in Hollywood. Also, unlike novelists and playwrights, you don't own the copyright on your original material. It hurts when you sell a project you love and then suddenly the project you really cared about will never see the light of day.

  Amy Holden Jones

  Hurt, School, Light

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• A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.

  Terence Rattigan

  Novelists, May, Pages

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• I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does.

  Tony Kushner

  Thinking, Support, Doe

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• I started acting pretty much by accident. I was doing read-throughs for a playwright who I was assisting, and then an agency saw me and said they wanted to represent me and get with me through my training and so on and so forth. It was pretty much by chance.

  Guy Burnet

  Agency, Training, Acting

  "Guy Burnet, Mortdecai Actor: On Boxing Every Day and Staying Balanced". Interview with Robert Piper, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. January 27, 2015.

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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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• The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights
  in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.

  George Bernard Shaw

  World, Bears, Hundred

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• A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

  John Lahr

  Book, Artist, Theatre

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• Lou Tyrrell has created a theatre that is a safe haven for playwrights, a birthing center for new American writing. Arts Garage has created a vital, enthusiastic audience for theatre, music, painting and sculpture in Delray Beach.

  Israel Horovitz

  Beach, Art, Writing

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• More than any other contemporary British playwright, Tom Stoppard populates his plays -- from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead to The Invention of Love (his portrait of the poet and scholar A. E. Housman) -- with characters from life and literature. But one cannot always tell the difference between those who are real and those who are imaginary.

  Mel Gussow

  Real, Character, Play

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• I started in theater and I wanted to write plays, but I never really found an original voice as a playwright.

  Atom Egoyan

  Writing, Play, Voice

  "Writer/Director Atom Egoyan Talks THE CAPTIVE, His Writing Process, the Non-Linear Narrative, Dark Material, REMEMBER, and More". collider.com. December 10, 2014.

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• I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

  Colin Callender

  Writing, Oscars, Tvs

  Source: deadline.com

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• I did a thing called 24 Hour Plays, a thing they do every year on Broadway. A bunch of playwrights and actors get together, you write a play and you act it out in 24 hours, literally. People pay and the money goes to charity. So I did one - I was horrible. I was bad. I was terrified. And I was like, "Oh, I gotta do this again." Because I know I can do it.

  Scott Raab

  Writing, Years, Play

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.

  Robertson Davies

  Past, Audience Of One, Long

  Robertson Davies (2008). “Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading”, Penguin Group Canada

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• I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

  August Wilson

  Art, Writing, Cutting

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• The mission of the playwright ... is to look in his heart and write, to write whatever concerns him at the moment; to write with passion and conviction. Of course the measure of the man will be the measure of the play.

  Robert Anderson

  Passion, Writing, Heart

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• If a playwright tried to see eye to eye with everybody, he would get the worst case of strabismus since Hannibal lost an eye trying to count his nineteen elephants during a snowstorm while crossing the Alps.

  James Thurber

  Eye, Elephants, Theatre

  James Thurber (1990). “Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself”

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• I love the students - they are remarkable, inspiring people. I would miss teaching if I stopped doing it. The kind of work I do is pretty diverse: I can cast a play while doing a polish of a screenplay, while thinking about a new play and revising another. In other words, the kind of work that I do during my work day is not just writing, yet it is all part of the job of being a playwright.

  Donald Margulies

  Jobs, Teaching, Writing

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