Playwright Quotes - page 2

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

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.

Tracy Letts

To me, the job of a playwright is to explore and bring to light our lives. You can't hold back; you have to give in to this. Sometimes, you say things people don't want to hear.

Ted Lange

Philip Kaufman's Twisted walks like a thriller and talks like a thriller, but it squawks like a turkey. But back to deus ex machina. This is a phrase you will want to study and master, not merely to amaze friends during long bus journeys but because it so perfectly describes what otherwise might take you thousands of words. Imagine a play on a stage. The hero is in a fix. The dragon is breathing fire, his sword is broken, his leg is broken, his spirit is broken, and the playwright's imagination is broken. Suddenly there is the offstage noise of the grinding of gears, and invisible machinery lowers a god onto the stage, who slays the dragon, heals the hero, and fires the playwright. He is the "god from the machine."

Roger Ebert

I fell into playwriting accidentally, took some classes in it, and also took creative writing classes, but I really didn't expect it to be a career because I didn't believe there was a way to make money as a playwright without being lucky and I didn't feel particularly lucky.

Orson Scott Card

Bringing in a wounded soldier is getting to be rather like waving an American flag at the end of an act. One cannot harbor feelings of unmixed admiration for the playwright who will hide behind either of them. p. 250.

Dorothy Parker

I think a playwright realizes after he finishes working on the script that this is only the beginning. What will happen when it moves into three dimensions?

Don DeLillo

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.

Peter Shaffer

The actors feel that the music played before the curtain rises will put the audience in the wrong mood. The playwright suggests that the (purposefully lugubrious) music be played at twice-speed. This peps it up somewhat while retaining its essentially dark and gloomy character. The actors listen carefully, and are pleased.

Donald Barthelme

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

José Saramago

I was to slowly discover that Savarkar was a bundle of contradictions and a historian's enigma. He simultaneously means many things to many people. An alleged atheist and a staunch rationalist who strongly opposed orthodox Hindu beliefs and the caste system and dismissed cow worship as mere superstition, Savarkar was also the most vocal political voice for the Hindu community through the entire course of the Indian freedom struggle.... A feted revolutionary who created an intellectual corpus of literature that inspired the revolutionary movement in India for decades, Savarkar was also a passionate and sensitive poet, a prolific writer and playwright, and a fiery orator. ...The social reformer in him strove to dismantle the scourges of untouchability and caste hierarchies, and advocated a unification of Hindu society. (Vinayak Damodar Savarkar)

If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.

Marsha Norman

I don't suppose there is a country in the world where a playwright has such a tremendous field for modesty as Canada.

Robertson Davies

A playwright . . . is . . . the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's gre.

Arthur Miller

So I humbly accept the honor, keeping in mind the words of a British playwright, John Mortimer it was, "No brilliance is needed in the law. Nothing but common sense and relatively clean fingernails." Well at best I've got one of the two of those.

Bono

A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.

Sam Shepard

I don't want to be a playwright, I want to be a rock and roll star.

Sam Shepard

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.

Tony Kushner

As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You inflict things on people.

Tony Kushner

I think I'll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.

Tony Kushner

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

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

Gabrielle Zevin

It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.

John Lithgow

I never wanted to be a playwright.

Zoe Kazan

I started my career as an actor, then morphed into a playwright who accidentally became a novelist with my first book 'Fall On Your Knees.'

Ann-Marie MacDonald

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