Quotes About Playwright

One of the things I love about my job as a playwright or as a screenwriter is that I get to do a lot of research and a lot of thinking and taking a lot of notes before I turn it in.

Literary figures have no pre-history. It is said that a theatre director who was staging one of Harold Pinter's plays asked the playwright for some hints as to what his characters were up to before they came on stage. Pinter's reply was 'Mind your own fucking business.

Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.

A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.

Family dramas are tough, as a playwright. Most stories are about characters going on a trip or a new character coming to town, because that's how you learn information about them. But with family, they all know each other already. There's years of history in every interaction.

It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.

Literature is a cake with many toys baked inside-and even if you find them all, if you don't enjoy the path that leads you to them, it will be a hollow accomplishment. There was a playwright named Heller, American, I believe, who summed it up this way. He said, 'They knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one." — George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill) "Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one." — Churchill's response

A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe's finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.

From the point of view of the playwright, then, the essence of a tragedy, or even of a serious play, is the spiritual awakening, or regeneration, of his hero.

I see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

I remember being asked when I was in high school what do I want to do when I grow up and the answer is so indicative - I would like to have been a successful playwright.

I moved to New York in 1980, and I met Beth Henley, who's a marvellous playwright and who I have a real personal and professional association with, in 1982. I met her in a stalled elevator - we were the only two people in there - and she's been one of my very dearest friends since.

On receiving his M.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1587, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) had already written parts I and II of his play Tamburlane the Great. Bringing fame to its author, and a new style to tragic theater, Tamburlane was the beginning of a brilliant, unfortunately brief, career. Marlowe's plays were to prove original in their earnest portrayal of single personalities who were deeply flawed, often criminal, but still somehow heroic.

I'm dying to do a Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class,' 'Buried Child,' 'True West,' 'Cowboy Mouth,' 'Fool for Love' - I'll do any of them.

I always have something big enough to say as a playwright. It's storytelling.

Shakespeare broke a mold. After about five years of writing, he saw women as women, including the bind they had been put into. No other playwright, writing before Shakespeare or at the same time as Shakespeare, had ever seen women as women.

I suppose half the time Shakespeare just shoved down anything that came into his head.

In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list.

I really believe that studying organization, even in the form of studying detective story organization, is very, very valuable for a playwright, a budding playwright.

There's no good reason to change a Neil Simon line. The day that I'm funnier than Neil Simon, Hell will be a very chilly place.

My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.

If the playwright is strong enough to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise, he'll do his work the way he was going to anyway.

I know all about improvisation and the free-form that mirrors the chaos of our time, but I do like to feel that the playwright has done some work before I got there.