Playwright Quotes - Page 14

• I'm an actor and a playwright, and I don't earn much.

  Ellen McLaughlin

  Actors

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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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• I think in theater the playwright is king. Those words are unchangeable. They are the reason that everything else flows from.

  Greta Gerwig

  Kings, Thinking, Flow

  Source: www.moviesonline.ca

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• Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev.

  Tom Stoppard

  Drama, Writing, Russia

  Source: news.postimees.ee

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• The director was only invented in the nineteenth century. So directors have only been around for 200 year,s and playwrights have been around since Sophocles and Euripides.

  Sarah Ruhl

  Years, Directors, Century

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

  Israel Horovitz

  Actors, Invention, Theater

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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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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• 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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• 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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• 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 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 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 was first introduced to August Wilson in the 80s when Charles Dutton did Ma Rainey and James Earl Jones and Courtney Vance did Fences. I've long considered August Wilson to be one of the five greatest playwrights in American history.

  Denzel Washington

  August, Long, Firsts

  Source: www.theawesomemuse.com

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• I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.

  John Guare

  Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I wanted to be a director first to protect my writing. I'm a playwright and you don't need to protect your writing when you're in the theater because everyone's there to protect the writing. When I had an idea for a film that I really cared about as my own, I wanted to direct it, and then I immediately became interested in directing in and of itself because it's such a deep art. You suddenly have all these tools at your disposal to tell the story.

  Kenneth Lonergan

  Art, Writing, Ideas

  "When the world feels dangerous, films showing the human experience are key, directors say". Interview with Mark Olsen and Yvonne Villarreal, www.latimes.com. January 5, 2017.

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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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• 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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• 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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