Quotes About Plays

It was the eternal contest for reputation and prestige that encouraged Londoners to endow new hospitals or write great plays or crack the problem of longitude for the navy. No matter how agreeable your surroundings, you couldn't get famous by sitting around in some village, and that is still true today. You need people to acknowledge what you have done; you need a gallery for the applause; and above all you need to know what everyone else is up to.

I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have.

My father was a very special human being. He was brilliant in academics, sports and the arts. He wrote, performed and directed plays in English and Hindi/Urdu at his regiment.

At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.

After the success of 'August,' there were people saying I should change my life. And maybe I should have bought a yacht and traveled the world instead of returning to Steppenwolf to act in and write plays. But I'm from the Midwest, and that's what we do: We go back to work.

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.

I wrote fiction during my entire childhood, from age 4 to 18, and started writing plays when I went to Yale and Oxford.

I hope to make an impact not only on the field, in the community, in the locker room. But on the field, catching the ball, returns, running the ball, getting the tough gritty yards, being able to make those special plays and being a great teammate, that's what I hope to have.

Do I think he's got character? Yeah. You don't play defense like that without deeply caring about teammates... John Wall plays real defense. He's got real character.

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays.

I would audition for all the school plays, and finally, my last year, I got the role as Pinocchio - finally.

But I find with Francis Bacon, some of the things were in the place, and someone who was connected with these schools of thought, and someone who had a motivation that equals the scope of the comedy and the tragedy in the plays.

I love that he's both comic and tragic, and highly poetic but also just dirty at times. ... I love that within the world of Shakespeare's plays, the whole world is sort of encompassed in a certain way.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

I trained in theater. And I started in theater with my first two jobs doing stage plays.

If I had planned to be a singer, I would have got trained. In fact, I was more into theatre and plays while growing up.

When I was in high school, they opened an arts high school. I didn't read music, and I wasn't a trained dancer, so I was like, 'OK, I guess I'll go into acting.' I asked my mom if she knew any plays for my audition, and the only one she knew was 'A Raisin in the Sun.'

When I was at Cambridge in the early fifties, there was a school nearby for training Army officers in Russian, and some imaginative genius came up with the idea of putting on Russian plays with the students to improve their language skills.

I like to ground plays in reality so they can jump higher. So we can account for the trampoline, so we can account for the leap.

They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.

The truth is that a lot of plays aren't political at all. In American theater history, political theater has tended to crop up when there's a crisis, a national crisis.

I think he [Vaclav Havel] felt that he could speak more truth, in a way, through writing plays.

Literature - novels, plays, and poems - can have an uncanny dual life, where they simultaneously represent something eternal and something historical, and this is often how they are taught in school.