Quotes About Playwriting

I guess television is so much on the word. It's so much closer to playwriting - the scale is more just about the voices and the internal lives. Movies, it's a very different canvas.

For me, playwriting is sharing my experiences, telling my stories.

With playwriting, there's a lot of false starts. Ill-fated first acts, etcetera. I blame it all on Shakespeare. He stole all my ideas like three hundred years before I was even born. He futuristically ruined my career.

I wrote my first play when I was nine. It was performed at Hampstead Theatre.

In elementary school, I was always writing little plays for my friends to be in. I was much more of a director than a performer.

Because I'm an American woman, and I write straight plays, it's always been sort of assumed I would never be done on Broadway. But that was never the goal.

Writing a play to get to Broadway and have a national tour is a sure way to write a terrible, terrible play.

I always start a play by calling the characters A, B, and C.

There are no rules for writing a play. It is easy, indeed, to lay down negative recommendations -- to instruct the beginner how not to do it. But most of these "don'ts" are rather obvious; and those which are not obvious are apt to be questionable. It is certain, for instance, that if you want your play to be acted anywhere else than in China, you must not plan it in sixteen acts of an hour apiece; but where is the tyro who needs a textbook to tell him that?

I started writing my own plays, and I would sell out, but after everything was said and done, I'd break even. That's being successful.

My fault now is making my plays too short.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I am not, at heart, a playwright.

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, passionate; he must be something of an imbecile, something of a poet, something of a liar, something of a damn fool.

I wrote my first play when I was nine, it was about Robin Hood, from Maid Marian's point of view. I was a feminist from day one.

This is the problem I have: I write a play and I give it to a director and they say, 'I'll do it one condition: if you play the role.'

I write for film or, in this case, television when I haven't got a play cooking.

I wonder if Shakespeare ever had to write a play in 10 days while suffering from jet-lag? Probably. It would explain why his comedies are so crap.

I did playwriting, creative writing, short story, novelization.

I've only ever taken a playwriting class, but I like creative writing and writing screenplays.

I find playwriting to be incredibly difficult compared to screenwriting. Part of it is that I grew up watching movies and not watching plays.

I find playwriting really painful. I love it, or I wouldn't do it, but I don't love the theater as much as I love movies.

Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.