Richard Foreman quotes

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience. (Richard Foreman)

I was enchanted by the escape into that meticulous world that seemed real yet not... well, it seemed not real, but very detailed and meticulous, bizarre.

Richard Foreman

It's true, I don't like the real world.

Richard Foreman

If I wasn't in the theater, I would be a hermit.

Richard Foreman

So I decided to start writing plays, and went to Yale.

Richard Foreman

My play is the ultimate expression of my feeling of the twilight of Western civilization.

Richard Foreman

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

Richard Foreman

You know, actually, I went to Yale because I wanted to stay out of the army.

Richard Foreman

I'm there to make a kind of theatrical music that is desperately missing in my life. And if other people don't like it, I'm very unhappy, but I can't do anything about that.

Richard Foreman

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

Richard Foreman

Because even at the age of fifteen, I used to go see all the Broadway shows and feel that they were sentimental, that they were pandering to the audience and trying to manipulate the audience. I had no use for practically any of the shows that were hits. (Richard Foreman)

Now, when I started my theater, the modus operandi was having the actors stare right into the audience.

Richard Foreman

I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

Richard Foreman

I realized that I had to be honest about where I was, where I was coming from, and what I was trying to do.

Richard Foreman

What really happened was one day I decided to write a new kind of play.

Richard Foreman

Which implies that the real issue in art is the audience's response. Now I claim that when I make things, I don't care about the audience's response, I'm making them for myself. But I'm making them for myself as audience, because I want to wake myself up.

Richard Foreman

I've been trying to figure out for at least the last 10 years how to force myself into something more risky.

Richard Foreman

From that time through the time I was a New Dramatist, when I was something like twenty-two, I saw absolutely everything in New York. Absolutely everything.

Richard Foreman

Quite the opposite. I might fall on my face, but I feel born again.

Richard Foreman

All the dialogue on tape, and we'd play the tape in performance. Then I thought it'd be interesting if the actor's repeated what they heard on the tape, but at a slower speed, so we'd get a web of language.

Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman

Richard Foreman - Image

Occupation: American Playwright
Born: June 10, 1937
Died: January 4, 2025
Quotes count: 20