Quotes from David Ives

Learning to write for the theatre is learning to be a human being, because the theatre by its very nature makes you deal with other human beings.

With my plays, when the lights go down, at least the audience isn't thinking, 'Oh, God, two more hours of this.

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.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

Lists are anti-democratic, discriminatory, elitist, and sometimes the print is too small.

I admire pop songs that are perfect at three minutes.

Plays are always about intense relationships, whether they're intense love relationships or family relationships or existential relationships.

I think everything should be in verse. 'The New York Times' should be in verse.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

Ultimately one has to pity these poor souls who know every secret about writing, directing, designing, producing, and acting but are stuck in those miserable day jobs writing reviews. Will somebody help them, please?

Vanda (as Dunayev): In our society, a woman's only power is through men. Her character is her lack of character. She's a blank, to be filled in my creatures who at heart despise her. I want to see what Woman will be when she ceases to be man's slave. When she has the same rights as he, when she's his equal in education and his partner in work. When she becomes herself. An individual.

Vanda (as Dunayev): When she becomes herself--an individual. Thomas (as Kushemski): you only say that because you yourself are so individual. Vanda (as Dunayev): A man usually says that to a woman whose individuality he is about to undermine.

so even an assassin can make the flowers grow. -variations on the death of Trotsky

I felt flattered to be the kinda person one would kick out of a saloon. That takes some character.

He might have thought white people was coyotes, but he still shared food with me. Long as people do that, I guess it don't matter what they think of you.

I'll take happiness. My happiness, not society's happiness. I will love a man who pleases me, and please a man who makes me happy—but only as long as he makes me happy, not a moment longer.

To me, this is a play about two people who are joined irreparably. They're handcuffed at the heart.

Hell isn't other people. It's other people telling the same story for the twentieth time.