Playwriting Quotes

• Playwriting gets into your blood and you can't stop it. At least not until the producers or the public tell you to.

  T. S. Eliot

  Blood, Theatre, Producers

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• Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

  Arthur Miller

  Art, Expecting, Heard

  Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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• Anything you put in a play -- any speech -- has got to do one of two things: either define character or push the action of the play along.

  Edward Albee

  Character, Play, Two

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• I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

  Orson Scott Card

  Believe, Writing, Class

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• Feydeau's one rule of playwriting:
  Character A: My life is perfect as long as I don't see Character B.
  Knock Knock.
  Enter Character B.

  John Guare

  Character, Long, Perfect

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• Playwriting is all about empathy, getting inside the head of someone who is not you, to think like they think without judging them.

  Donald Margulies

  Thinking, Judging, Empathy

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• In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.

  David Mamet

  Mistake, Writing, Thinking

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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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• Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.

  Edward Albee

  Stage, Hanging Out, Guts

  "Shoptalk: Conversations About Theater and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer - and Tennessee Williams' Mother by Dennis Brown". Book by Dennis Brown, 1992.

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• When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Differences

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• I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

  Zoe Kazan

  Play, Grew Up, Difficult

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• I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

  Zoe Kazan

  Movie Love, Painful, Theater

  "The Hot Seat: Ruby Sparks' Zoe Kazan". Interview with Amy Plitt, www.timeout.com. July 15, 2012.

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• There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

  Tony Kushner

  Fundamentals, Kind, Irresponsibility

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• Playwriting isn't a calling so much as it is a hazing process.

  Paula Vogel

  Theatre, Calling, Process

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• For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

  Sam Shepard

  Writing, Light, Play

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• I don't have an audience in mind when I write. I'm writing mainly for myself. After a long devotion to playwriting I have a good inner ear. I know pretty well how a thing is going to sound on the stage, and how it will play. I write to satisfy this inner ear and its perceptions. That's the audience I write for.

  Tennessee Williams

  Writing, Play, Long

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• Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.

  Moliere

  Love, Funny, Money

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• I think that as a playwright, if I detail that environment, then I'm taking away something from them [designers]. I'm taking away their creativity and their ability to have input themselves, not just to follow what the playwright has written. So I do a minimum set description and let the designers create within that.

  August Wilson

  Creativity, Thinking, Input

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• I began as a dramatist in the theater, so I'm always thinking about how a story moves, what it looks like, how to engage the senses, how dialogue sounds, what feels authentic and sounds real, what's funny, how to build distinctive and original characters - all the aspects of playwriting, scene-building, the architecture of dramatizing.

  Adriana Trigiani

  Real, Moving, Character

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• My mother was working on her college degree throughout my childhood, and being the youngest in the family, that meant being dragged to a lot of her classes. She majored in playwriting, so I was exposed to theatre from a very young age, and it was just the most magical world to me.

  Valorie Curry

  Mother, College, Class

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• It's no use to go and take courses in playwriting any more than it's much use taking courses in acting. Better play to a bad matinée in Hull, it will teach you much more than a year of careful instruction.

  Noel Coward

  Thinking, Years, Play

  "The Essential Noël Coward Compendium: The Very Best of His Work, Life and Times".

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• One of the things he liked about playwriting as to any other kind of writing is that a playwright is a w-r-i-g-h-t, not a w-r-i-t-e; in other words, that a playwright is more of a craftsman than an artist of the big novel.

  Simon McBurney

  Writing, Artist, Theatre

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• The day the child realizes that all adults are imperfect, he becomes an adolescent; the day he forgives them, he becomes an adult; the day he forgives himself, he becomes wise.

  Alden Nowlan

  Inspirational, Forgiveness, Wise

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• Playwriting, like begging in India, is an honorable but humbling profession.

  Moss Hart

  India, Theater, Humbling

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• I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors.

  Edward Gordon Craig

  Art, Believe, Play

  Edward Gordon Craig (2008). “On the Art of the Theatre”, p.25, Routledge

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