Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I never wanted to be a playwright.
It's an odd mix, the life of a playwright.
I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg.
It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
I'm a contemporary playwright in a postmodern world.
I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.
It's very hard to be a playwright because it's very competitive.
I'm an American playwright. Tennessee Williams got in all our DNA.
The Greek playwrights, we're all beholden to them, every one of us.
I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
Like a dog, a playwright lives in an eternal present and a play is never closed.
If I had not had music in my life, I would be the neurasthenic vision of the playwright.
A playwright lives in an occupied country. And if you can't live that way you don't stay.
My favorite playwright is probably Samuel Beckett, and he was always laughing at the abyss.
I can write better plays than any living danced, and dance better than any living playwright.
A conventional playwright tries to tell you more about the characters than they know about themselves.
We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage.
But as the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, From many a bad beginning great friendships have formed
The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.
A lot of American playwrights seem to have a career as a playwright. I don't consider it a career at all.
There are a number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but that's not at all the same thing as being influenced.
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He's the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.
Stage is the place of the playwright: you're guided by great actors and directors, but it's the playwright's word on the page that counts.
A playwright must be his own audience. A novelist may lose his readers for a few pages; a playwright never dares lose his audience for a minute.
Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright's pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.
Playwrights are naturally wary and protective - God, who's more protective than a playwright? You read a play, the playwright wants to hear from you immediately.
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
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.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a playwright. But everything I wrote, I thought, was weak. And I can remember falling asleep in tears because I had no talent the way I wanted to have.
My only responsibility as a playwright and a storyteller is to give you the time of your life in the theatre. I just happen to think that with Hamilton's story, sticking close to the facts helps me. All the most interesting things in the show happened.
In 1980 I sent a play, 'Jitney,' to the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, won a Jerome Fellowship, and found myself sitting in a room with sixteen playwrights. I remember looking around and thinking that since I was sitting there, I must be a playwright, too.
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.
A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.
I love what I do, and I love the audience, and I love the fact that I get to do it, and I love, I love our craft very, very, much, and it's a noble craft. We have a responsibility to it, and to the audience, and to the playwright, and to the message. I won't ever care less.
I was born in Newton, MA. Graduated from Brown University in 2001 with honors in English as a playwright. I attended the National Theater Institute at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, CT just after Brown. I moved to NYC in 2002 and was a professional... waiter, for 3 years.
I don't think Othello is a jealous man - he is a man who has been deceived by another person, just as everybody in the play is deceived by that person... The playwright uses the word 'jealousy' over and over and over again, but I don't think it has anything to do with being jealous.
I enjoy all forms of writing, but playwrighting is what made me what I am. Not only working with the ghosts of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare, but what it is to be a playwright, to be interacting with human beings in the live theater and affect people on such a direct, emotional level.
Because I didn't go to graduate school or have mentorship out of college, meeting other playwrights and developing those friendships as a result of being a 'grown up' playwright - that's become an essential community for me. My contemporaries are all my mentors whether they know it or not.
I had a sort of bad experiences as a playwright early on, when directors were putting in huge concepts that I didn't intend, or they were stylizing something that was compromising the play, so I started to think like, 'Well if I'm going to fight against this, I should learn how to direct.'
You must keep people happy backstage because that affects what's onstage. During a run, the playwright feels like the mayor of a small town filled with noble creatures who have to get out there and make it brand new every night. When a production works, it's unlike any other joy in the world.
The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.
Theater is about interpretation and what an actor and what a director brings to a piece too. I'm open to it every time I work with a director and a group of actors. I have to be open to that interpretation. I'm not one of those hysterical playwrights that come and say, "This is not what I intended to do." It's one rendition of the piece.