Playwright Quotes - Page 11

• All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

  Joseph L. Mankiewicz

  Years, Three, Hundred

  "Fictional character: Margo". "All About Eve", www.imdb.com. 1950.

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• Necessarily, I'm always involved in casting, as any playwright is, because the whole process of putting on a play is a collaborative, organic effort on the part of a bunch of people trying to think alike.

  David Ives

  Thinking, Play, People

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• You have to get beyond your own precious inner experiences. The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings. The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

  Stella Adler

  Ideas, Choices, Feelings

  Howard Kissel, Stella Adler (2000). “Stella Adler - The Art of Acting: preface by Marlon Brando compiled & edited by Howard Kissel”, p.65, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.

  Laura Wade

  Odd

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• To me, the job of a playwright is to explore and bring to light our lives. You can't hold back; you have to give in to this. Sometimes, you say things people don't want to hear.

  Ted Lange

  Jobs, Light, People

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• When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

  Gabrielle Zevin

  Writing, School, Eight

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• Like most playwrights, I hate talkbacks with a passion that can burn a hole through hell.

  Katori Hall

  Hate, Passion, Hell

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• My first acting class was taught by a little known playwright, David Mamet, who then cast me in my first play, opposite John Malkovich.

  John Mahoney

  Opposites, Class, Play

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• I never wanted to be a playwright.

  Zoe Kazan

  Wanted

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• One of the best things that happened for me as a playwright is becoming a comic-book writer.

  Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

  Book, Becoming, Comic

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• In terms of collaboration, working on a new piece is always thrilling, as I'm sure most people would say, because the playwright is in the room and the piece itself evolves in response to what is happening in the room.

  Gideon Glick

  People, Collaboration, Pieces

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• It's a lucky circumstance when you get to usher in new work, because you are able to ask the playwright and the director (who in a new work is always in dialogue with the playwright) an unlimited amount of questions.

  Gideon Glick

  Directors, Lucky, New Work

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.

  Mitchell Hurwitz

  Growing Up, School, Successful

  "Mitch Hurwitz on the Creative Process, Casting Jason Bateman, and Loose Seals". Interview with John Sellers, www.vulture.com. October 22, 2013.

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• I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

  Don DeLillo

  Moving, Thinking, Three

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• But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Character, Play, Plot

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I became fascinated by the fact that people write to give away rather than write to be read. It's the difference between playwrights and novelists.

  David Suchet

  Writing, Differences, People

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

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• I wrote my first play at the age of 10, 55 years ago, and I've always found it a fantastic relief to imagine I know what things would be like from the point of view of other individuals and to send out signals from where I actually am not. Playwrights never need to write from the place where they are.

  Wallace Shawn

  Writing, Views, Years

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

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• For a long time I managed to think two things simultaneously, that I am actually a good playwright, and that the next time I write a play I will be revealed as someone who is no good at all.

  Tom Stoppard

  Writing, Thinking, Play

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• As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.

  Tom Stoppard

  Experts, Able, Illusion

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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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• I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

  Jose Saramago

  Novelists, Poetic, Essayists

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• An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.

  George Jean Nathan

  Actors, Literature, Holes

  George Jean Nathan (1970). “Encyclopedia of the Theatre”, Associated University Press

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• I would enjoy having dinner with the poet/playwright Derek Walcott.

  Walter Dean Myers

  Dinner, Poet, Enjoy

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• You can't make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

  Sam Shepard

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• 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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