PLAYWRITING QUOTES
quotations about playwriting
There are three primal urges in human beings: food, sex, and rewriting someone else's play.
ROMULUS LINNEY
Six Plays
Drama lies in extreme exaggeration of the feelings, an exaggeration that dislocates flat everyday reality.
EUGENE IONESCO
Notes and Counter Notes
We keep narrowing the definition of what a play can be. We're losing the opportunity for someone like Samuel Beckett to spring up, because we no longer want our plays messy. But my God, sometimes we need mess. These are messy times and plays can reflect that. Angels In America is a mess -- and I mean that as a compliment. Hamlet is a mess. If someone wrote Hamlet today, first thing you'd hear a director say is, 'that advice to the players bit doesn't advance the story.' Why do we only allow our classics to be messes?
PAULA VOGEL
"Paula Vogel: How She Keeps Driving", Playbill, April 7, 1997
Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.
ANTON CHEKHOV
letter to A. P. Chekhov, April 11, 1889
Writing has ... been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
HENRIK IBSEN
Speeches and New Letters
People often ask me how long it takes me to write a play, and I tell them 'all of my life.' I know that's not the answer they're after -- what they really want is some sense of the time between the first glimmer of the play in my mind, and the writing down, and perhaps the duration of the writing down -- but "all my life" is the truest answer.
EDWARD ALBEE
introduction, Three Tall Women
If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.
EUGENE IONESCO
Notes and Counter Notes
I can't expose a human weakness on the stage unless I know it through having it myself.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
foreword, Sweet Bird of Youth
One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its development. The story which is independent of character--which can be carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially a trivial thing.
WILLIAM ARCHER
Play-making: A Manual of Craftsmanship
One had the right to write because other people needed news of the inner world, and if they went too long without such news they would go mad with the chaos of their lives.
ARTHUR MILLER
"The Shadows of the Gods"
First you just write a good play, and then you try to get it produced under the best possible circumstances. I never think Broadway is the best possible circumstance for a serious play.
LANFORD WILSON
The Playwright's Art: Conversations with Contemporary American Dramatists
When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.
EDWARD ALBEE
interview with Daniel Stern, 1998
In playwriting, you've got to be able to write dialogue. And if you write enough of it and let it flow enough, you'll probably come across something that will give you a key as to structure. I think the process of writing a play is working back and forth between the moment and the whole. The moment and the whole, the fluidity of the dialogue and the necessity of a strict construction. Letting one predominate for a while and coming back and fixing it so that eventually what you do, like a pastry chef, is frost your mistakes, if you can.
DAVID MAMET
The Paris Review, spring 1997
Watching first nights, though I've seen quite a few by now, is never any better. It's a nerve-racking experience. It's not a question of whether the play goes well or badly. It's not the audience reaction, it's my reaction. I'm rather hostile toward audiences--I don't much care for large bodies of people collected together. Everyone knows that audiences vary enormously; it's a mistake to care too much about them. The thing one should be concerned with is whether the performance has expressed what one set out to express in writing the play. It sometimes does.
HAROLD PINTER
The Paris Review, fall 1966
I'm back in fashion again for a while now. But I imagine that three or four years from now I'll be out again. And in another fifteen years I'll be back. If you try to write to stay in fashion, if you try to write to be the critics' darling, you become an employee.
EDWARD ALBEE
The Dramatists Guild Quarterly, 1996
Playwriting is not done when you finish a draft of your play you're happy with. Plays are meant to be produced--performed by actors for a live audience. Without performance, a play is like a custom-built car that's never taken out of the garage--it may look good, but it hardly serves any good purpose.
ANGELO PARRA
Playwriting for Dummies
Do you know what a playwright is? A playwright is someone who lets his guts hang out on the stage.
EDWARD ALBEE
Shoptalk: Conversations About Theater and Film with Twelve Writers, One Producer--and Tennessee Williams' Mother
I hold more and more surely to the conviction that the use of masks will be discovered eventually to be the freest solution of the modern dramatist's problem as to how -- with the greatest possible dramatic clarity and economy of means -- he can express those profound hidden conflicts of the mind which the probings of psychology continue to disclose to us.
EUGENE O'NEILL
"Memoranda on Masks"
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
The last collaborator is your audience ... when the audience comes in, it changes the temperature of what you've written. Things that seem to work well -- work in a sense of carry the story forward and be integral to the piece -- suddenly become a little less relevant or a little less functional or a little overlong or a little overweight or a little whatever. And so you start reshaping from an audience.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005