Quotes About Playwriting

I did a brief stint with set design and stage design. And I tried playwriting, too.

Things rust, you know, like the heart. My cardiologist said, 'It's a pump; use it - that's the sole advice I've got to give you.' It's the same in playwriting. Don't theorise about it. Do it.

I was sending off my plays almost like an 8-year-old would send letters to Santa Claus. So it was a bit of a miracle when the Blank Theatre Company actually called and selected a terrible little play that I wrote.

Writing is an escape from a world that crowds me. I like being alone in a room. It's almost a form of medication- an investugation of my own life. It has nothing to do with I've got to get another play2

I wrote about 22 plays before 'When You Cure Me,' which was staged in 2005. I occasionally get them out and have a read, thinking maybe there's a thought or an idea or even a turn of phrase that I could use for something new. There's not. They're dire.

I like playwriting because it's rooted in a single location with actors standing talking to each other.

I don't think I've ever written about me. I'm not a character in any of my plays, except that boy, that silent boy that turns up in Three Tall Women.

It's so funny, I'm always stealing from Moliere, and nobody ever notices. I steal from him willy-nilly.

I'm aware of my old plays and occasionally think about them, but I'm much more anxious about finding the next play.

My husband, Steve Hamilton - an actor/producer and co-Director of the Southampton Playwriting Conference - and I had been working in the theatre in New York for many years.

I continue to work on plays, but I've always felt that you could put a note in a bottle and send it offshore, and you'd have as much chance communicating with people.

I'm not a theoretician about playwriting, but I have a strong sense that plays have to be pitched - the scene, the line, the word - at the exact point where the audience has just the right amount of information. It's like Occam's razor.

I have seen too many screenwriters of promise become formula addicts and slaves to stop watch structure. Spend that time watching movies, reading screenplays, reading plays, and most importantly - write from your gut.

There's a kind of a fundamental irresponsibility in playwriting, and the strength of playwriting comes from that irresponsibility.

Seven characters are too many for a ten-minute play. It'll be twenty minutes long! Fuck it. One of them is dead and the others can all talk fast.

Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard.

When I was first starting to write plays, I quite literally had never heard of the idea of studying playwriting. I wouldn't have studied it even if I had heard of it.

It would be exciting to write a play, Barbara thought, to see your creations put on the garment of mortality, to hear your words issuing from their mouths. But a play must always be a little disappointing; no actor can completely satisfy an author, and there must be some discrepancy between the author's conception of a character and the actor's expression. This was far better than any play, for the actors were themselves. They couldn't act out of character if they tried,

I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

When you begin a play, you're going to have to spend a lot of time with those characters, so those characters are going to have to be rich enough that you want to take a very long journey with them. That's how I begin thinking about what I want to write about and who I want to write about.