Quotes from Anne Bogart

You cannot create results. You can only create conditions in which something might happen.

Artists and scientists are activists. They look at the world as changeable and they look upon themselves as instruments for change. They understand that the slice of world they occupy is only a fragment but that the fragment is intrinsically connected to the whole. They know that action matters.

Most of the truly remarkable experiences I've had in theatre have filled me with uncertainty and disorientation

I write myself into existence by the stories that I tell about my life. I also write with my posture and with my manner of walking and speaking, and I write with words and with my actions.

We are debris arrangers. Equipped with what we have inherited, we try to make a life, make a living and make art. We are assemblers. We forge received parts into meaningful compositions. This state of affairs is our plight and our destiny, but it also offers the opportunity to find meaning as well as to find communion with others.

The art experience and the theater experience, gyms for the soul, generate heat and exercise the imagination, empathy, creative thinking, patience and tolerance. A gym for the soul is a place where personal investment is required and the return is real.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (Richard Rorty, philosopher)

My job is to transcend my own agenda in order to see the wider context and my job is to cultivate the kind of spaciousness where permission is possible. I try to create the room in which everyone is both participating and responsible.

Speaking a story can be an act of letting in light.

If what Picasso proposed is true, that the first stroke on the canvas is always a mistake, it is best to get on with the mistake, without delay, earlier rather than later. Write one sentence, make one choice or point at something and say "Yes." And then, as the process unfolds, and as long as I keep at it and stay attentive and resolute, making adjustments to each mistake, things eventually fall into place.

And it is this search for meaning that keeps us from living in fear. The key to a healthy life is not to be alone, to breathe the same air with others, to share the sensation of living through moments together.

But innovation and invention do not only happen with smart people who have all of the answers. Innovation results from trial and error. The task is to make good mistakes, good errors, in the right direction.

Limits are a necessary partner in the creative act as well as in the crafting of a successful life. What matters is the ability to look around and accurately recognize what is working for you and what is working against you, adjusting to the realities of the situation and mining the potential of the limits with invention and energy.

In the theater, the attitude of righteous ownership deprives the audience of an encounter with the unfamiliar.

Deep practice is slow, demanding and uncomfortable. To practice deeply is to live deliberately in a space that is uncomfortable but with the encouraging sense that progress can happen.

Every creative act involves a leap into the void. The leap has to occur at the right moment and yet the time for the leap is never prescribed. In the midst of a leap, there are no guarantees. To leap can often cause acute embarrassment. Embarrassment is a partner in the creative act—a key collaborator.

she made it clear that artists and audiences need to find the inner capacity to meet an event with spaciousness and a sense of possibility. Both life and art can prepare us for the openness that we need to bring ourselves to the unfolding moment.

Innovation is made possible by the width and breadth of a person's rummaging around the world, in traffic with the living and the dead. It is by transgressing the boundaries that separate us that we begin to find solutions to the world's present complexities because inclusion and incorporation of "the other" creates the conditions for innovation.

proposed an antidote to the deadening impact of capitalist spectacle in what he named "constructed situations," which calls on artists to create moments that coax people out of passivity, rendering them the co-creators of what promises to be, according to Debord, a less mediocre life.

Let's assume that we have a set number of days to indent the world with our beliefs, to find and create the beauty that only a finite existence allows for, to wrestle with the question of purpose and wrestle with our answers. (Jonathan Safran Foer, novelist)

Listening is a basic ingredient of attention, and it can be learned and practiced. Listening is fueled by interest and curiosity. It is a discipline and an action in the world, and the results are nearly magical. Hearing can restore. To be heard, really heard by another person, is to be healed.

Art is violent. To be decisive is violent. ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.

The object is freedom.