Playwright Quotes

If it`s stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it`s film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes.

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

I was a writer. I just wasn`t a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I`d be a better actor than I would a playwright.

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.

(On shooting in London, 2004) In the United States things have changed a lot, and it`s hard to make good small films now. There was a time in the 1950s when I wanted to be a playwright, because until that time movies, which mostly came out of Hollywood, were stupid and not interesting. Then we started to get wonderful European films, and American films started to grow up a little bit, and the industry became more fun to work in than the theatre. I loved it. But now it`s taken a turn in the other direction and studios are back in command and are not that interested in pictures that make only a little bit of money. When I was younger, every week we`d get a Federico Fellini or an Ingmar Bergman or a Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, but now you almost never get any of that. Filmmakers like myself have a hard time. The avaricious studios couldn`t care less about good films - if they get a good film they`re twice as happy, but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100-million pictures that make $500 million. That`s why I`m happy to work in London, because I`m right back in the same kind of liberal creative attitude that I`m used to.

I was one of those people who was literally famous for doing nothing . . . I was always a part of the club scene in New York and eventually was able to produce my own musical about AIDS ("Positive Me") because of the audience and press I received as a club kid. Eventually I was called in to screen test for this MTV show because word was out I was this neat club kid turned playwright. I got the job and basically was humiliated on the air every day. I`m an actor, not a hostess. It was horrifying. I had all this baby fat, so I was just HUGE on camera . . . I still can`t watch one frame of the show. Then I got all this hate mail because I couldn`t play the part right . . . Luckily the show got canceled after seven months. I was so relieved.

You can`t make a living as a playwright. You can barely scrape by.

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

(On losing the role of Frankie, which had been written for her by playwright Terrence McNally, to Michelle Pfeiffer in the movie version of "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune") "I thought it was wonderful to see a love story about people over forty, ordinary people who were trying to connect. We haven`t seen it before, and I don`t think we will see it with this movie Frankie and Johnny (1991)."

Everybody gets a little dose of Shakespeare. He`s the greatest playwright in the English language, but his politics are fairly square.

People always talk about Shakespeare being a very contemporary playwright. This production shows you how it is.

I pray to be of service to the playwright, the audience, the other actors and my character.

He was a giant figure in American theater. Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story.

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.

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.

I flatter myself a terribly liberal New York playwright, but his prose floored me because it was so extreme, ... I found myself asking, `Wow, does this have any value? Does this merit a place on bookshelves?` And I thought, if he could unnerve me so completely, then maybe he`d be a worthwhile subject for drama. Maybe he`d be the kind of figure about whom I could write a parable about free speech that made liberals and conservatives equally nervous.

Lane is a Tony-winning producer ( Thoroughly Modern Millie, La Cage aux Folles ) and part-time playwright. Based on the evidence here, Lane should stick to producing. He has attempted to write a romantic comedy/farce/backstage play. It fails as all three'¦ The playwright goes to remarkably tacky lengths to get laughs'¦ and still doesn`t get them'¦ Even the intentionally rotten musical numbers from I Married a Communist aren`t funny. Perhaps that`s because the clueless comedy surrounding them is just as amateurish.

(Though Wilson was the most notable playwright of his generation, he doesn`t seem to have influenced younger writers. He doesn`t have obvious imitators.) It would almost amount to arrogance to try to imitate him, ... His writing is so personal, with its musical rhythms.

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