20+ Annie Baker Quotes On Education, Play

Annie Baker is an American playwright from Amherst, Massachusetts. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Flick, as well as her Obie Award-winning play Circle Mirror Transformation. Her work is often characterized by its naturalistic dialogue and exploration of themes such as loneliness, alienation, and the search for connection. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Annie Baker on education, life, love.

I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down. — Annie Baker

I was raised by a single psychologist mother and we spent every evening sitting at the kitchen table and dissecting our emotions and speculating about the inner life of everyone we knew. — Annie Baker

Being sad and going out on terrible dates and having horrible breakups and then having a shitty job and then quitting the shitty job and then wondering if you shouldn't have quit the shitty job and then getting a new shitty job that you get fired off of after six weeks, it's all so good for your writing. — Annie Baker

I ended up becoming a playwright because you can be grammatically incorrect: people speaking in bad poetry or people attempting to speak well and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. The whole imperfection of it suddenly felt freeing to me. — Annie Baker

Yeah, I have the detail-obsessed, controlling personality of a novelist, but I somehow ended up writing plays. — Annie Baker

I'm terrible at speaking extemporaneously about my work - I get completely tongue-tied and consumed with fear. — Annie Baker

I think growing up in a small town, the kind of people I met in my small town, they still haunt me. I find myself writing about them over and over again. — Annie Baker

Film can express things that computers never will. Film is a series of photographs separated by split seconds of darkness. Film is light and shadow. — Annie Baker

I feel like my life is at its happiest when I don't have a looming deadline. There's some really groovy wonderful times, when I'm like, "I have a new piece, I'm excited about it, I'm reading all these books about it, but there's not a lot of time pressure, and I'm financially stable enough right now that I don't have to be trying to get another job." But that's so rare. — Annie Baker

I don't enjoy hearing the sound of my voice. The most important things for me are impossible to articulate extemporaneously. — Annie Baker

I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing. — Annie Baker

If anything, I was the opposite of most college students who think they can do anything. — Annie Baker

There are certain early plays of mine that I really don't like, but I can't imagine going back and fixing them. I would be totally incapable of it. I'm not in the head of the characters anymore. — Annie Baker

I never had a lot of ideas. I always have exactly one that is the next project; the idea of a project beyond that project is ludicrous. — Annie Baker

If I were less lazy, when my play was published, I would go and rewrite everything for the reader. But I don't do that. What people are reading is just me trying to get the actors and directors to do something or think about something. — Annie Baker

For me, on every project, I realize that I've boxed myself into a corner, or that the play necessitates some sort of theatrical convention that I realize I hate while I'm making it. So then the next play is always a rebellion. Or like, the thing I didn't even realize I was doing last time I will make sure I don't do this time. But there's always some other blind spot. And then that blind spot inspires the play that comes after. — Annie Baker

I feel like there's an obsession with pace right now in theater, with things being very fast and very witty and very loud, and I think we're all so freaked out about theater keeping audiences interested because everybody's so freaked out about theater becoming irrelevant. — Annie Baker

Writing is my primary way of expressing myself. — Annie Baker

For early plays of mine, I started with character. But I think that's because I hadn't been in theaters; I hadn't worked that much. I'm very interested in character, obviously, but once I started having my plays produced, I became so fascinated by the theatrical experiment and the weirdness of theatrical space, so now all my plays start with space and stage picture and setting - or container is maybe the better way to put it. — Annie Baker

For me, being a good creative writing teacher is actually kind of being a good therapist. The line is very porous - you can also be a creepy guru/abusive therapist, too, so you have to be very careful. But it feels really important to me. — Annie Baker

Life Lessons by Annie Baker

1. Annie Baker's work emphasizes the importance of taking time to appreciate the small moments in life, as they often contain the most meaningful experiences.
2. Her work also highlights the power of relationships, both in terms of the connections we make with others and the relationship we have with ourselves.
3. Finally, Baker's work encourages us to be mindful of the ways in which our actions can have an impact on others, and to strive for understanding and empathy in our interactions.