Quotes About Playwright

Yes, I am a failed playwright. I had three shows on Broadway by the time I was 30. They all flopped, and I fled.

I said it before and I'll say it again: books are dead, plays are dead, poems are dead: there's only movies. Music is still okay, because music is sound track. Ten, fifteen years ago, every arts student wanted to be a novelist or a playwright. I'd be amazed if you could find a single one now with such a dead-end ambition. They all want to make movies. Not write movies. You don't write movies. You make movies.

Edward Albee, the premier dark playwright of the American theater, would show up at rehearsal and quote his favorite lines from 'Auntie Mame'. He would stand at the back of the theater, not facing the stage, and sort of conduct the music of his play.

With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.

I have always been a huge fan of Shakespeare.

There are times, aren't there, when Shakespeare is a little dull.

I've always wanted to be in a play by Tom Stoppard.

I'd love to do theater. I've done so many plays in my life. I still think of that as my main thing.

In the end, one has to feel lucky that things fell out O.K. I've felt that all the years I've been writing plays.

A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.

When you tell people you're a playwright, their eyes sort of glaze over. But when you say you write the 'Fantastic Four' or 'Spider-Man,' they perk up. It's a touchstone that has gained more credibility as artistic expression.

What I want is an international monument to the world's greatest playwright. It would be an attraction that would be both educational and an automatic sight for tourists, like St Paul's and the Tower of London. It would be built with honesty and integrity not another Disneyland, but as nearly as possible a replica of the original Globe Theatre.

I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much.

I write plays instinctively. I don't like writing movie scripts.

Characters carrying the playwright's disapproval is a un-Shakespearian burden.

I have the vanity to think that every play I have written is different from the previous ones. Yet, even though they are written in a different way, they all deal with the same themes, the same preoccupations. 'Exit the King' is also 'The Bald Soprano.'

Stage is so important because it teaches me how to convey character with words - how to convey how a character reacts by the way they appear on stage. I can usually tell a playwright from someone who has never written for the stage. Did the character work? Did the dialogue reveal who the character is?

When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors.

It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare—at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children.

Whether it's Shakespeare or Moliere, irony is a key component in the construction of theatre. A script would be pretty bad if it was devoid of irony.

I am a playwright. I show What I have seen. In the man markets I have seen how men are traded. That I show, I, the playwright.

I feel like I'm a natural-born playwright, but the prose thing has always mystified me. How to keep it going? How do people do it, for years and years?

It is very, very difficult for a playwright to write a scene in which a young man has his first deep experience of sex with a girl whom he found immensely attractive, is fully satisfied by this event and gets up and blinds a lot of horses.

I became frustrated early on as a playwright by a kind of smug smallness in modern drama. There was a lack of what I now understand as courage in the work of others as well as in my own work, and I found I was mildly amused or interested by such plays but not deeply engaged or enlightened.