Playwright Quotes - Page 5

• Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

  Terrence McNally

  Writing, Heart, Play

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• I'm sensitive about the criticism [for not producing new playwrights], yes. But I'm hip to it as well. I read 500 new plays a year, and 99.99 percent of them are not good. I see no reason to do a new play just because it's new. It's like kissing your sister, a virtue, but so what? It seems to me more worthwhile to take a proven playwright and say, Write something for us.

  Gregory A. Boyd

  Writing, Kissing, Play

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• Poets and novelists and playwrights make themselves, against terrible resistances, give over what the rest of us keep safely locked within our hearts.

  Janet Malcolm

  Heart, Giving, Novelists

  Janet Malcolm (2013). “The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes”, p.70, Vintage

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• I now know that to do a worthwhile family history I must interpret the past without falling into either demonizing or unquestioning acceptance. . . . As a playwright, what I object to right now is any form of fundamentalism, whether it's nationalistic, religious or ethnic. . . . I think it is ridiculous - and fundamentalist, by the way - to say that I am not changed by the culture around me.

  David Henry Hwang

  Religious, Fall, Acceptance

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• Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

  Alex Cox

  Squares, Littles, Language

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• The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.

  David Hare

  Important, Crafts, Speak

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• I realized that I wanted to play characters and do traditional theatre. I wanted to make believe again. I like putting on a costume and pretending to be someone else for a few hours, and I have a great respect for playwrights.

  Lusia Strus

  Respect, Believe, Character

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• Of course, you would have to be insane to hope your child grows up to be a playwright or poet. Given the odds, you would have to be quite cavalier about your children's future.

  Mark Helprin

  Children, Growing Up, Odds

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• I'm inspired by playwrights, novelists, poets: The value of language has been a lifelong passion of mine. I enjoy it. I'm good at it.

  Mos Def

  Passion, Novelists, Language

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• At best, the relationship between drama critic and playwright is a pretty twiggy affair. When I'm asked whom I write for, after the obligatory, I write only for myself, I realize that I have an imaginary circle of peers - writers and respected or savvy theatre folk, some dramatic writers and some not, some living, some long gone. . . . Often a writer is aware as he works that a certain critic is going to hate this one. . . . You don't let what a critic might say worry you or alter your work; it might even add a spark to the gleeful process of creation.

  Lanford Wilson

  Hate, Drama, Writing

  "The Critic On My Shoulder" by Lanford Wilson, www.nytimes.com. December 29, 1996.

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• I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.

  Liev Schreiber

  Teacher, Lucky, Actors

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• One of the good thing about theater in the states, is that the playwright we do have a say, especially in the beginning, when the play is being discussed around the table. We talk about the play, and the actors listen, and there have been cases, you disagree on something... I mean, actors don't usually tell you what they're going to do, they do it. Of course, you try to speak with the director and say, "Is there any way you can bring this actor to do something different?" You try as much as you can, but then, you also have to be open to interpretation.

  Nilo Cruz

  Mean, Trying, Different

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• If you would shut your door against the children for an hour a day and say: 'Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!' you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.

  Brenda Ueland

  Mother, Children, Doors

  Brenda Ueland (1987). “If You Want to Write”

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• I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.

  Lusia Strus

  Character, Actors, Praying

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• What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence . . .. And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well.

  Caridad Svich

  Reading, Discovery, Voice

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• The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.

  Oliver Stone

  Greek

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I learned from the Macarturos. I had never been at a table with a labor organizer and a playwright and a performance artist and an anthropologist and a human rights lawyer. Usually at most gatherings, it's all writers. But suddenly I was at a table with all these different people and I learned from each of them, learned from the work they're doing, learned new ways to solve my problems.

  Sandra Cisneros

  Artist, Rights, People

  "Talking in Our Pajamas". Interview with Ruth Behar, quod.lib.umich.edu. Summer, 2008.

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• I thought I wanted to be a playwright because I was interested in stories and telling stories.

  Francis Ford Coppola

  Stories, Telling Stories, Wanted

  "Five Oscars as a Producer, Director and Screenwriter". The Academy of Achievement, www.achievement.org. June 17, 1994.

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• I've had a long association with the theater over the years but I had never produced a play and it was something that I'd always wanted to do.The movies moved away from dramas, and I think that I'm very excited by the opportunity to take smart writing that takes risks and see it on stage. It's exciting to see that engagement between the audience and the playwright.

  Colin Callender

  Smart, Drama, Writing

  Source: deadline.com

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• When the modern movement began, starting perhaps with the paintings of Manet and the poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, what distinguished the modern movement was the enormous honesty that writers, painters and playwrights displayed about themselves. The bourgeois novel flinches from such notions.

  J. G. Ballard

  Honesty, Movement, Painting

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• You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

  Larry Wall

  Baby, Writing, Ideas

  "Big Think Interview". bigthink.com.

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• I'm a playwright. All I care about is the play being good.

  Aaron Sorkin

  Play, Care, Be Good

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.

  William Goldman

  Broadway, Three, Shows

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• A playwright, especially a playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he should pay some attention to the nature of the audience response - not necessarily to learn anything about his craft, but as often as not merely to find out about the temper of the time, what is being tolerated, what is being permitted.

  Edward Albee

  Attention, Crafts, Pay

  Edward Albee, Philip C. Kolin (1988). “Conversations with Edward Albee”, p.46, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• I know too many playwrights, or would-be playwrights, or would-have-been playwrights, that are around my age, who were bitter or have gone to something else because they got such a raw deal from critics, and some are quite wonderful writers.

  Jennifer Tipton

  Age, Would Be, Gone

  Source: theatrenow.wordpress.com

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