Quotes About Playwright

In grammar school I read 'Act One' by Moss Hart, and being a playwright struck me as the most magical and romantic career anyone could have... But I never did write a play.

I started as a playwright. Any sort of scriptwriting you do helps you hone your story. You have the same demands of creating a plot, developing relatable characters and keeping your audience invested in your story. My books are basically structured like three-act plays.

I'm happy that I feel a little less out of place in filmmaking than I once was - but it's almost impossible for a playwright in the U.S. to make a living. You can have a play, like I did with 'Angels ' and it still generates income for me, but it's not enough for me to live on and have health insurance.

I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.

In order to understand Hamlet as Shakespeare understood it, we need to see the play through the playwright's profoundly Christian eyes. This inescapable truth was understood by the Shakespearean critic E. M. W. Tillyard, who emphasized Shakespeare's breadth of spiritual vision in Hamlet: I doubt if in any other play of Shakespeare there is so strong an impression of the total range of creation from the angels to the beasts. 

Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: "It's about to make me a lot of money.

I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.

The influence of William Shakespeare on the English language and literature can hardly be exaggerated. His life spanned A.D. 1564 to 1616 and he made a name for himself as a poet and playwright. Creating such memorable works as Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, he has become the most-quoted author of the English-speaking world. Because of this, many of the words and phrases he used or coined are still in use today. His plays are still studied and performed.

In January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.

I had an affair with a downtown playwright. Two things about this man: He was an ex-alcoholic, and he was phobic about leaving the city. I was too old to think him poetic, but I did.

One is just an interpreter of what the playwright thinks, and therefore the greater the playwright, the more satisfying it is to act in the plays.

But I remember talking with Mr. Garrick once in London, and his reference to the playwright as a little god who directs the actions of his creations, exerting absolute control upon them. Mrs. Cowley argued with this, saying that it is delusion to assume that the creator controls his creations and that an attempt to exert such control while ignoring the true nature of those creations is doomed to failure.

Theatre is an actor's medium though behind the stage there is a playwright, director and perhaps in some, a music composer too, yet the actor is the one who ultimately tells the story to the viewers.

When he was directing some comedies by the revered nineteenth-century Russian playwright Chekhov, he started to notice how often people in nineteenth-century Russian plays faint — very often — so he called the production 33 Swoons and focused on all the fainting. Whenever someone fainted, a band played a fanfare. There was a different fanfare for men and women.

The dramatist's function is (1) to earn a living for his family and himself and (2) to try to entertain people for a few hours.

I grew up in Manhattan and, since my father was a playwright, all I ever wanted to be was a stage actress.

The Playwright was excited in the way a child is excited on Christmas morning. I liked this. Most people didn't get excited about anything other than their own discontent.

I lived with this tremendous fear of failure because my father was a playwright and a director, and I think he did a couple of things as a child as an actor as well, and he... he failed, basically.

But what the measured prose of psychiatrists and the carefully calculated statistics of social scientists rarely capture is the experience of inner struggle. These "significant changes" do not occur automatically. In fact, they must often fight against our resistance. In this sense, midlife is a drama more worthy of a playwright than a scholar. We are characters in the play, caught at the opening of the second act, and we do not know what will happen next.

If a playwright is funny, the English look for a serious message, and if he's serious, they look for a joke.

The theater is a communal event, like church. The playwright constructs a mass to be performed for a lot of people. She writes a prayer, which is really just the longings of one heart.

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.

Edward Albee, our greatest living playwright, American treasure, who watched Doubt from beginning to end and loved it, all while a bored B. J. Novak slept on him.

If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.